The Highway Rat

Product Information

The Highway Rat is an exciting and child friendly book about a mean, greedy and vicious rat that goes round stealing other animal’s food. 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. Last Christmas the company produced a two-part animated special based on Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.

He was joint producer of Nick Park's 1995 Oscar winning Wallace and Gromit film, A Close Shave and has won two Baftas for animated short films, A Close Shave and Stage Fright. I recently worked in a school where this book formed part of a whole week of Highway Rat themed activities and the children truly loved it. I know there are people who like The Gruffalo, by the same author, better, but to me, The Highway Rat is where it's at. The highway rat steals to keep up his reputation as a great thief and there is plenty of repetition in the book that ensures a high tempo pace throughout.The moral issue of theft which forms the central conceit of the book lends itself to further extraction and questioning. I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

The rhyming and repeated text makes it great fun for children to join in with the words and there is plenty to talk about in the story. Excitedly he dashes into the cave at which point the duck takes the Rat's horse and gallops off down the road [the illustration of the little duck on a massive horse galloping off down the road is the star illustration in a collection of excellent ones].I'm reading Donaldson's books for a group, and though she's not to my particular taste, I'll round up to 4*s anyway for this one. 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! I believe this idea worked really well and was a positive to see all year groups, children and parents so involved with the sharing of a text and a new love for a book developed. I really liked the illustrations as well in this book and they all had bright colours which really drew the children’s eyes to what the author wanted them to see!

Six of Julia and Axel’s books have each sold over one million copies in the UK alone and have been awarded Specsavers Platinum Bestseller Awards. Rob Brydon (the Narrator): “My favourite Donaldson/Scheffler books are a tie between The Highway Rat and The Snail and The Whale. He steals clover from a rabbit, nuts from a squirrel, and he even steals his own horse's hay, although cakes and chocolate are what he prefers. She incorporates familiar phrasing like “And the Highway Rat went riding – riding –riding – riding along the highway. He steals clover from a rabbit who has nothing else, a leaf from some ants, even hay from his own horse.They were captivated by the rhythm and rhyming patterns of the book and learned exciting new vocabulary. it's a retelling of/homage to Alfred Noyes' poem "The Highwayman" (without all the, you know, shooting and death and ghosts and whatnot).