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. Donaldson was born and brought up in Hampstead, London, with her younger sister Mary. [4] The family occupied a Victorian three-storey house near Hampstead Heath. Her parents, sister and their pet cat Geoffrey lived on the ground floor, an aunt and uncle (and later their children, James and Kate) on the first floor and her grandmother on the second floor. Find out about the highwaymen of the past. What did they do? Do you know the names of any famous highwaymen? Donaldson has also written a phonic reading scheme of short stories comprising 60 books of Songbird Phonics, published by Oxford University Press. [7]

Draw a picture showing the inside of one of the Highway Rat’s bags. What different items has he stolen? 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.

The Gruffalo was sent to Reid Books in 1995. Donaldson sent the text to Axel Scheffler, whom she had met only once or twice, briefly, following the publication of A Squash and a Squeeze. Within days Macmillan Children's Books made an offer to publish The Gruffalo, which was illustrated by Scheffler and published in 1999. 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! As mom who was an English Lit major, I LOVE this cheeky little book...it's a retelling of/homage to Alfred Noyes' poem "The Highwayman" (without all the, you know, shooting and death and ghosts and whatnot). My son loves the great rhythm, and at two, fills in the words at the end of each stanza. The fact that it's a long poem makes it a fun read-aloud, and it's great to start to expose little ones to poetry concepts at an early age, from a literacy standpoint. Plus, it's just fun. 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?

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). a b Franklin-Wallis, Oliver (17 December 2020). "How Julia Donaldson conquered the world". The Guardian . Retrieved 28 December 2020. The Highway Rat gets fat from eating everyone else’s dinner. Can you think of a healthy diet to help him keep fit? a b "Entertainment stars in New Year Honours". BBC News. 28 December 2018 . Retrieved 29 December 2018. Julia Donaldson divides her time between Scotland and West Sussex where she lives with her husband. Axel is from Hamburg, and has lived in the UK since 1984. He lives in London with his family but travels extensively.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? 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?

The Highway Rat terrorises the local village. Cunning, daring and altogether selfish, he delights in stealing the locals’ food. But they won’t stand for it much longer. 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. In 1995, while looking for ideas for an educational series of plays based on traditional tales, Donaldson came across a version of a Chinese story about a little girl who escapes being eaten by a tiger by claiming to be the fearsome Queen of the Jungle and inviting him to walk behind her. The tiger misinterprets the terror of the various animals they meet as being related to her rather than him, and flees. Donaldson sensed that this story could be developed into more than an educational item and returned to it later as a possible basis for a picture book. She decided to make the girl a mouse, and chose a fox, owl and snake as woodland rather than jungle creatures but wasn't satisfied with lines like "They ought to know, they really should / There aren't any tigers in this wood".

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Although the story line is very simple, there is a lot of cross curricular links there. Our year 2 created a ‘WANTED!’ poster for the Highway Rat and wrote about the crimes of the rat and why they needed to catch him as soon as possible. The children had to use a range of descriptive language to make their writing interesting and for creating a sense of urgency. In addition, our year 2 created their own version of the capture of the Highway Rat with a clear beginning, middle and end. They had to use a lot of similes, adjectives and body language to create tension and a chase to grab their reader’s attention.

Create a price list for the cake shop and imagine that some customers would like to buy a selection of the cakes. How much will they need to pay? How much change will they need to be given? What coins would be used for this? 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.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. 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. 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. Find out about the author, Julia Donaldson. Watch this video and think of questions that you might like to ask her. 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!