Main Lesson: Creation Stories - Ancient Hebrews with Mr. Séamus
September 21-24, 2026
In the third grade Main Lesson this week, we heard about how the kingdom of darkness was cast to the depths, leaving a middle space between the heavenly heights and the shadowy depths. Into this empty darkness in the middle realm the beginnings of our world were born. Starting with fire and light, which was divided into an upper air and light region and a lower fire realm, the evolution of creations continued with water forming a vast ocean, the light was formed into a sun and the many stars by the creative powers of light and warmth. Into this new watery world plants came to be. Eventually the plants were gifted with a crown of light and the vast sea was adorned with waterlilies.
From there all the flowers were created to reflect the light of the many stars from the earth, land was raised with mountain peaks, rocks and soil and from this mineral element the moon was made. Each morning the third graders participated in building these pictures of creation by retelling the parts of the story we had heard the day before as a group and worked to bring these experiences to expression in their main lesson books with drawing and short excerpts from the story. We are continuing on with The Tubal Cain poem by Charles Mackey, learning another stanza and empowering our speaking voices with strength by coordinating our jumping with syllabic stresses. This is a way to incorporate creative will forces into the speaking voice, that can be engaging for children at this stage of development and older. We are also acquainting ourselves with the trochaic and iambic poetic meters through stepping out an excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. At this stage this process is strictly intuitive and experiential and not at all intellectual. It is a playful journey of feeling the qualities of each poetic rhythm. Later, when they are older, we can put names to these experiences that they are having, such as trochaic and iambic. We also explored cognates in our speech work which are consonant pairs that share a placement in the mouth with one being voiced and one being unvoiced. The children enjoyed discovering that each consonant pair is technically produced in exactly the same way and yet one engages the speaking voice, while the other has only the placement and a whispery breath. For example: “K” and “G” - to make a “K” sound no tone is required, while making a “G” sound requires the voice to make a tone. Nonetheless both “K” and “G” are made by bringing the back of the tongue and the soft palette (back of the mouth) together. It has been truly a privilege working with the third grade these past weeks and we are looking forward to living into more of the creation stories in the coming weeks.
with gratitude,
Mr. Séamus
