Via

Ages: 7-11
Contributor:
Sam Collins

A touching animated poem about life’s journey, beautifully animated.

Watch this video with your children, and then try some of our teaching and activity ideas below.

Teaching Ideas and Resources:

Identify the rhyming structure of the poem and make a list of the rhyming words the poet has used.
Choose or write some poetry to perform.
Write a character profile for one of the characters.
Discuss why the filmmaker chose to make the people so small in relation to the environment.
The first line of the poem describes life as a puzzle – give children a blank puzzle template and ask them to fill in the different elements of the man’s life.
Discuss the meaning of the ball. What does it symbolise?
Collect vocabulary to do with roads and journeys from the poem, then find some more using a thesaurus.
The title of the story, “Via”, means road in Latin. Look up the English definition in a dictionary. Is it a good title for the film?
Make a storyboard for the film.
Write a biography of the main character.
Split the class into groups and give each group one of the settings from the film. Collect adjectives and adjectival phrases to describe it.

Use an animation program to animate part of this poem or another one.
Use a program such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker to perform and illustrate a poem using copyright-free images.

Stop the film on one of the landscapes and ask the children to draw their own version.
The landscapes in the film were built up in layers on a computer. Try drawing or painting a background and then adding the people and foreground on tracing paper.

The music features a repeated phrase of a few notes. Compose a piece based on one phrase which is repeated and altered.
Listen carefully and identify which instruments have been used.

Discuss the contrasting environments in the film. Make a fact file comparing two of them.

Make a drawing showing your life’s journey so far.
Watch the section from 2:15 to 2:21 where the man is remembering himself as a boy with his dog. What are your important memories?
The film is about the man’s hopes and dreams. What are your hopes and dreams?