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Laura Pullman with Reggie<\/p>\n
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES<\/p>\n
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The show included a dance-off for plucky parents<\/p>\n
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES<\/p>\n
For the next 90 minutes, the pint-sized theatregoers rap Michael Rosen\u2019s classic We\u2019re Going on a Bear Hunt<\/a> to the tune of House of Pain\u2019s Jump Around, Julia Donaldson\u2019s Superworm to Will Smith\u2019s Men in Black, and so on. <\/p>\n The showman, who is wearing his signature shades, gold necklace and light-up trainers, keeps hammering the point that reading is cool: \u201cYou can\u2019t rap a book if you can\u2019t read a book.\u201d <\/p>\n At one point, a dozen children bounce around on stage rapping MC Grammar\u2019s World Book Day Song. \u201cWowza\/ I\u2019ve just found this voucher\/ Let me take a closer look\/ Hmm, says I get a free book, no way,\u201d they shout. <\/p>\n The world is falling apart, the budget is a fast-approaching bullet and shops are already flogging Christmas tat, but in this packed theatre it feels like we have cause for hope.<\/p>\n \u2022 Donate, volunteer, pledge: join the Get Britain Reading campaign<\/a><\/p>\n The following morning I meet MC Grammar, also known as Jacob Mitchell, in a caf\u00e9 near Waterloo station. The father of four is a busy man. As well as travelling the UK for his Books, Beats and Barz theatre tour, he has just published his second children\u2019s book, about a schoolboy, Z, who can only speak in rhyme. <\/p>\n A further five books in the same Rap Kid series are in the pipeline. <\/p>\n \u201cKids think books are like Netflix now,\u201d Mitchell, 42, says. \u201cThey read the first and they\u2019re like, \u2018next one\u2019. I want to keep them reading and I don\u2019t want to feel like I\u2019m letting them down.\u201d<\/p>\n Mitchell\u2019s own rhyming story is remarkable. In 2019 he rapped Julia Donaldson\u2019s The Gruffalo to his young daughter and posted the video. <\/p>\n It quickly racked up 10 million views and, days later, he was flown to Los Angeles to rap Dr Seuss\u2019s Green Eggs and Ham on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. <\/p>\n Back then, he was a teacher in a primary school in Barnet. When he was tasked with getting his class through a new spelling, punctuation and grammar test, Mitchell decided to inject some fun. \u201cThey walked in the classroom one day and I was dressed up in a rap outfit and I said, \u2018Stop! Grammar time,\u2019\u201d he says. The riff on the MC Hammer lyric from 1990 was lost on his audience of ten-year-olds, but they relished learning about adverbs through rapping. <\/p>\n Mitchell was soon travelling to different London schools once a week to spread his rap techniques. After DeGeneres came calling, the British breakfast shows followed and he landed his own educational TV show, Wonder Raps, on Sky. <\/p>\n Now working full-time as MC Grammar, Mitchell has performed everywhere from the O2 arena to No 10, from Great Ormond Street Hospital to Glastonbury. <\/p>\n He is also an ambassador for World Book Day. \u201cYou\u2019ve got thousands of kids going to [school] dressed up as MC Grammar,\u201d he says, grinning. \u201cIf that\u2019s not impact \u2026\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 There is a silver bullet for childhood happiness: a love of reading<\/a><\/p>\n His 16-year-old self wouldn\u2019t have believed how his future career would pan out. As a teenager growing up in the north London suburbs, Mitchell dropped out of school after getting just one GCSE, and worked in a hardware shop. <\/p>\n He rediscovered a love of books, returned to college and studied psychology and sociology at university, where he focused on learning through writing raps. His mother, an early years practitioner, nudged him towards teaching.<\/p>\n These days MC Grammar has 400,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok, and 71,000 fans on YouTube, where he raps about metaphors, times tables, dinosaurs and, of course, books. He visits schools across the UK. <\/p>\n After one performance at an Ipswich primary school the head teacher was in tears. One of their pupils was a selective mute who had never uttered a word at school but suddenly, on stage, he rapped every word of an MC Grammar song. \u201cFor me, that was just a massive moment,\u201d says Mitchell.<\/p>\n Passionate and speaking a mile a minute, it is clear that he is determined to help turn around last year\u2019s depressing statistic which showed that only 35 per cent of those aged 8-18 read for pleasure. <\/p>\n \u2022 Why volunteering to read with schoolchildren is such a gift<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cKids need to see themselves in books,\u201d he says. \u201cDo we have books that represent children today and the way they feel, look, speak?\u201d His Rap Kid books contain slang used in playgrounds: peng (nice), drip (stylish clothes) and salty (angry). \u201cMeet them where they\u2019re at,\u201d Mitchell says. \u201cIf they speak like that in the classroom, why would that be a negative when put in a book?\u201d<\/p>\n Mitchell has skin in the game: he and his wife, Andrea, a brand ambassador for a haircare company, live in the capital with their three daughters, Ellie, ten, Khloe, eight, and Tia, four, and their son, Neeko, two. Unsurprisingly, their father has developed some novel tactics for the family; there is a bell at home and whenever someone rings it everyone must drop whatever they\u2019re doing and start reading.<\/p>\n In Mitchell\u2019s book, all reading is beneficial for children, whether it\u2019s a comic book or newspaper football coverage<\/a>. On nights when his older children want to watch television he has a compromise: subtitles on, volume off. \u201cThey\u2019ll subscribe to that because they\u2019re still getting KPop Demon Hunters<\/a> or whatever they\u2019re watching,\u201d he says. \u201cLiteracy is all around us.\u201d With that MC Grammar is up and off to rap the classics. <\/p>\n