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! Walsh, John (3 October 2015). "Julia Donaldson interview: The Gruffalo author on how Judi Dench and busking helped her career". The Independent . Retrieved 12 April 2020. The Highway Rat gets fat from eating everyone else’s dinner. Can you think of a healthy diet to help him keep fit? Poetry also featured strongly in Donaldson's early life; she was given The Book of a Thousand Poems by her father when she was five years old, and her grandmother introduced her to Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes. Donaldson attended New End Primary School and then Camden School for Girls. During her childhood and adolescence she acted (understudying the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Old Vic where she made the acquaintance of a young Judi Dench and Tom Courtenay), sang with the Children's Opera Group, and learned the piano.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. It could also be used for PSHE lessons, to explore why stealing is wrong and how it can affect the victim’s life. In science they can look at food chains and animal habitats and use the story to explore these topics further. Look at the use of rhyming words in the story. Can you think of other words which rhyme with the ones used? The Art of Giving: An Interview with award-winning illustrator Axel Scheffler". ArtLink Central. 12 April 2017 . Retrieved 18 December 2017. The Highway Rat is our new book for our Literacy lessons in Year 1. They have all really engaged with the story and the characters. It has provided us with many different discussion points - one child pointed out to me today that the Highway Rat is naughty not only because he steals people's food, but also because he talks to strangers! This gave us the opportunity to have a little PSHE talk about 'stranger danger', and why the Highway Rat has not been making good choices!Written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Shaffer (The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom), The Highway Rat is a delightful story. It’s largely written in verse which lends it a tremendous pace and sense of excitement that will engage younger children, particularly in years one and two. The moral issue of theft which forms the central conceit of the book lends itself to further extraction and questioning. Using talk partners, you can ask children to come up with responses to particular questions – is The Highway Rat right to steal their food etc? What would you do if The Highway Rat stole your food? I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married. From the 1990s when Donaldson was extensively visiting school and libraries, she extended techniques learned in Bristol and Brighton to encourage children to act and sing with her. Following the publication of The Gruffalo she was invited to book festivals, participating in the Edinburgh International Book Festival every year from 1999 onwards, and appearing regularly at Hay, Cheltenham and Bath festivals, as well as at many theatres. Donaldson's parents, James (always known as Jerry) and Elizabeth, met shortly before the Second World War, which then separated them for six years. Jerry, who had studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University, spent most of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp where his knowledge of German earned him the position of an interpreter. Elizabeth, also a good German speaker with a degree in languages, meanwhile did war work in the WRNS.

Draw a picture showing the inside of one of the Highway Rat’s bags. What different items has he stolen? 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. a b "Julia Donaldson". Desert Island Discs. 15 November 2009. BBC Radio 4 . Retrieved 18 January 2014.I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. We have also managed to link it to art - we created Wanted posters for the Highway Rat. The children had to use their literacy skills to describe the rat and his terrible crimes, and then got the opportunity to be artistically creative as well. Once in Glasgow, Donaldson 'pitched' once again for song-writing commissions with the BBC. Between 1990 and 1994 she wrote for various programmes including Thinkabout Science (two series) and Playdays, composing songs for presenters and puppets (such as Lizzie and the Whybird) to sing.

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. 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. 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.

As the story develops, the Highway Rat’s horse has to carry more of the things that he has stolen. How much might each of these things weigh? How much would the horse have to carry in total? Absolutely marvelous! As an adult reader I totally adore the clever and delightful textual parody of Alfred Noyes' classic The Highwayman ballad (and indeed also much appreciate that with The Highway Rat, Julia Donaldson has just taken Alfred Noyes' external form and has not made her text content wise into some silly love story and her Highway Rat into a romantic type of hero, as no, that would in my opinion have made The Highway Rat annoyingly maudlin and not the engaging and so very much fun poetic parody of The Highwayman that it is). 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.