The Highway Rat

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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 is described as a ‘baddie’ and a ‘beast’. Can you think of any other words that might be used to describe him? Draw a picture showing the inside of one of the Highway Rat’s bags. What different items has he stolen? Look at the use of speech marks within the story. Could you use these to turn the story into a play and perform it to others?

Rix, Juliet (28 February 2009). "Living without Hamish: how a family copes with suicide". The Guardian.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 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. 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.

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? 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.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.

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.

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. 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 Highway Rat gets fat from eating everyone else’s dinner. Can you think of a healthy diet to help him keep fit? 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. I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.