The Highway Rat

Product Information

We have spoken about how the book rhymes, and how it can be read in a rhythmical way. The second time that we read it, the children were able to join in with some of the repetitive sentences, which they all really enjoyed.

Both Julia and Axel enjoy international renown for their work. Julia was the UK Children’s Laureate 2011-13 and honoured with an MBE for services to Literature. Axel’s artwork is exhibited internationally; he has illustrated for many charities, and designed the Royal Mail Christmas stamps in 2012. The Highway Rat is a baddie and he takes whatever food he wants from any traveller that he stops. Pastries, puddings, buns, biscuits, nuts, fish, milk, flies and even a bunch of clover and a leaf, the last mentioned from an army of ants! He even steals his own horse's hay!Donaldson has also written a phonic reading scheme of short stories comprising 60 books of Songbird Phonics, published by Oxford University Press. [7] In 1983 the family of four moved to Bristol where Malcolm Donaldson was appointed as Senior Registrar in Paediatrics to United Bristol Hospitals. By then the television writing had dried up and the folk scene had waned. Julia Donaldson wrote and sang a few topical songs for adult radio programmes (including one about the Guinness Distillers take-over bid, which appeared on Financial World Tonight), did occasional amateur acting and street theatre, and wrote the songs for the Kingsdown community play Nine Trees Shade. She also became a volunteer in Hamish's primary school, hearing the children read aloud. She devised short plays with the right number of parts for a reading group, rotating the roles until each child had read the whole play. The piece would then be performed to the entire class. This approach seemed to build confidence in reading aloud as well as being enjoyable, and Donaldson stored the plays in a drawer for possible future use. A typical public event consists of acting out (more or less word-for-word) four stories, and singing three or four songs (mostly from Donaldson's three albums of songs – The Gruffalo Song and Other Songs, Room on the Broom and Other Songs and The Gruffalo's Child and Other Songs). There is always a strong element of audience participation, with children (and sometimes their parents) invited on stage to act parts in the stories. Malcolm Donaldson almost always takes part in the events, and they are also often joined by other performers including family members. Find out about the police and how they help people in society. Could you invite a member of the police force to your school to talk to you about their jobs? What questions would you ask them? The author uses different words to describe how the Highway Rat speaks (e.g. declared, bellowed). Can you think of any more?

The couple continued to busk in Europe during holidays, including in France and Italy, with Julia Donaldson writing "The French Busking Song" in French, and "The Spaghetti Song" in Italian. By 1971, Donaldson was working in London at Michael Joseph publishers as a secretary to Anthea Joseph but was also given considerable leeway as a junior editor. At weekends she and Malcolm took part in the Bristol Street Theatre, a group of mainly postgraduate students inspired by the late playwright David Illingworth. The group devised simple, unscripted plays which could be performed in the playgrounds of poor council estates and which recruited children from the audience to take over some of the roles. This was to have a lasting effect on Donaldson's interaction with children in her own shows as an established children's writer. Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. Find out about the author, Julia Donaldson. Watch this video and think of questions that you might like to ask her. Imagine that one of the animals in the story is being interviewed by the police. What would they tell the police about their encounter with the Highway Rat?

Clip

After the war, they were reunited and married, and in 1950 they bought the Hampstead house together with Jerry's mother, his sister Beta and her husband Chris (the two men had met in the P.O.W. camp). When Donaldson was six her father contracted polio and thereafter was confined to a wheelchair, though he still led an active life, working as a lecturer in the Maudsley Hospital's Institute of Psychiatry, where he pioneered genetic studies using the model of identical twins brought up apart. Last Christmas the company produced a two-part animated special based on Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. Premiering on BBC One on the 26 and 27 of December the films featured the voices of Dominic West, David Walliams, Rose Lesley and Jemma Chan. With over 10 million viewers for their first broadcast slots, the films have just been nominated for a BAFTA and an International Emmy, and have already won multiple awards including the Cristal for best TV Production, Annecy. One of my television songs, A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published. Most children love acting and it’s a tremendous way to improve their reading. My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.Donaldson has also performed jointly with her illustrators, particularly Axel Scheffler and Lydia Monks. She has performed the Donaldson/Scheffler books not only in English but also in German on several tours and at the Berlin Festival. In 2007, when Malcolm took a sabbatical from his job, he joined Julia on a World Tour, acting and singing in Bermuda, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and America.

Look at the use of rhyming words in the story. Can you think of other words which rhyme with the ones used? The Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson moved to Steyning and she is still enjoying a "honeymoon period" in the smallest town she has ever lived in". The Argus. 7 May 2016 . Retrieved 18 January 2019. Donaldson composed two musicals for children: King Grunt's Cake (1976) and Pirate on the Pier (1980) which she and a small cast performed both in London and Brighton. Influenced by their Bristol Street Theatre experience, Donaldson ran a Saturday-morning workshop for children in Portslade from 1974 to 1976. During these sessions a simple play would be devised, followed by making of props and costumes, rehearsal and then a performance. This seemingly teaches him a lesson, and, thinner, greyer and meeker, the Rat lands a job in a shop ... what kind of shop is for you to guess, but believe me it is probably an easy guess!The Highway Rat’s manners were ‘rough and rude’. Can you make a list of good manners to help the Highway Rat be nicer to others? The Art of Giving: An Interview with award-winning illustrator Axel Scheffler". ArtLink Central. 12 April 2017 . Retrieved 18 December 2017. Find sources: "Julia Donaldson"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( March 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)