Kids’ rapper MC Grammar breaks record for largest rap lesson
Award-winning teacher, author and viral educational rapper MC Grammar (UK) broke the world record for the largest rap lesson with the help of 859 London school pupils.
On Monday 2 March at the New Wimbledon Theatre in South-West London, an event was organized by MC Grammar’s publisher Simon & Schuster Children’s Books in partnership with the Wimbledon Book Fest to celebrate the National Year of Reading.
World Book Day is also celebrated on the same week (5 March), offering a timely opportunity to honour the value of books.
MC Grammar was voted Teacher of the Year and is also a World Book Day Ambassador, but people don’t always know that the artist, whose real name is Jacob Mitchell, had struggled in school as a kid.
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Discovering books and his love for reading was his turning point with education.
Jacob believes that no child should be left behind, and that there needs to be excitement, challenge, inclusion and, most importantly, fun in the classroom.
On the day, 859 children from 18 different schools attended a 30-minute lesson where they learned how to rap and rhyme, joining in with some of his famous book raps.
They rapped rhymes from some of MC Grammar’s most popular videos, such as the ‘Times Table Song’ and ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’.
Then one lucky kid got to join him on stage and fill in the gaps to one of his songs using vocabulary from earlier in the show.
Part of the lesson consisted of coming up with rhyming words, e.g. circle, turtle, purple, whirlpool and hurdle. So in the end, they made a rhyme out of that – a purple turtle who didn’t have any hurdles.
With help from the audience, the duo rapped along to a tale about MC Grammar’s purple turtle.
The record will even be included in the Guinness World Records 2027 edition, which comes out later this year.
MC Grammar said: “This whole place was full, the kids were reading, they were rapping, they were having a good time celebrating books and words. It was amazing. Thank you, Guinness World Records!”
Read more stories about record-breaking celebrities in our Arts and Entertainment section.
MC Grammar went viral in 2019 after a video of him rapping popular children's book The Gruffalo received over 5 million views. The father-of-two’s debut children’s book, The Adventures of Rap Kid, was the best-selling debut fiction title of 2025.
Congratulations, MC Grammar, you are Officially Amazing!
