I’m Jonny, a teacher and writer from East London. Most days you’ll find me trying to get children excited about words … and usually it’ll be the very old, peculiar ones about gods, myths and monsters.

I design and lead projects in schools and outdoors, mixing mythology, poetry and nonsense in ways that (hopefully) leave children buzzing rather than groaning. The Iliad, Norse sagas, riddles, ridiculous poems — anything with a spark of strangeness gets an airing.

My work has carried me from classrooms in Newham to schools in India, caves in Greece and valleys in the United States. I also teach on Outschool, exchanging old wisdom online with young mythologists around the world.

I write books with HarperCollins, Scholastic and Oxford University Press, and sometimes decamp to the woods or the coast to run poetry retreats.

I believe learning should be joyful, a bit chaotic, and full of discovery.

Whether it’s a Year 6 class writing odes to their pets, or a group of nine-year-olds retelling the Trojan War with cardboard swords and battle cries, I want children to feel the thrill of words, and to find their own voices in the process.

And to have a laugh whilst doing it … we all need a bit more of that!