Helen Keller Informative Speech

Hi guys my names maddie and today i’m going to be speaking about helen keller and the challenges she had to face throughout her lifetime.

Helen Keller was born on the 27th of june 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama in the United States. To begin with keller was a perfectly healthy baby girl but at just 19 months old she not only lost her sight but also her hearing leaving her completely deaf and blind at 1 year and 7 months old. The cause of this tragedy was an illness that was described at the time by doctors as being “an acute congestion of the stomach and brain” but with the help of modern medicine we now know that what keller most likely had was scarlet fever or meningitis.

One of the biggest questions i had while researching helen keller was “if she was both blind and deaf how did she learn to communicate with others?” well at the time of her illness helen was able to communicate by using hand signs that only the family chef’s 6 year old daughter could understand. But as she grew older helen learned to adapt to the world around her and by the age of 7 keller had over 60 hand signs that she used to communicate with her family, she also learnt how to tell which member of her family was walking past her from the vibrations of their footsteps.

She was inspired by a passage she had read by charles dickens in a novel called american notes about the successful education of another deaf and blind women. After being told by doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist that they would not be able to help helen, they finally found a 20 year old doctor named Anne Sullivan, who was willing to take on helens case, little did they know at the time that this was the beginning of a 49 year long