A fourth grade teacher made a rap video to welcome his students back to school

Youtube/Ty Gotham

Dwayne Reed.

A first-year teacher in Illinois is starting school in style: Instead of handing out a welcome-back newsletter, he wrote a welcome-back rap.

Dwayne Reed, a teacher at Jane Stenson Elementary School near Chicago, penned a song called "Welcome to the 4th Grade," shot a music video, and then uploaded it to Youtube for his students and their parents to watch in advance of the first day back.

In the song, Reed tells his students about himself ("I'm from Chicago and I love eating pizza") and teases some of the things they'll learn during the school year ("We'll study mathematics / Division and adding / And don't forget fractions / We're gonna have a good time.")

In one shot, he even dresses up like Albert Einstein:

Youtube/Ty Gotham

"I just kind of wanted to spice up the old-fashioned newsletter, so I thought, 'Man, I'm kind of good at music, I know how to put lyrics together well. Let's go ahead and put a song that will get the kids excited,'" he told ABC. 

"Kind of good at music" might be an understatement: Reed came up with the idea, wrote the song, and recorded it all in a single day. 

In just a few days, the video's racked up about 170,000 views at the time of this post. And, unsurprisingly, parents and students have reacted positively to the enthusiastic welcome. 

"I definitely heard from a lot of other parents and teachers and they said, 'Hey, you've done a good job,' so I'm real happy about it," Reed told ABC.

Here's the full video: