Watch how a car is made - from the engineers' drawings to the final touches on the assembly line when you visit Mercedes-Benz operations and see how they produce the M-Class SUV. You'll also get to meet all the friendly and skilled people who make the Big Auto Plant work.

This video will show your child, step by step, how a car is built.  It starts at the Mercedes Benz factory in Stuttgart, Germany and includes a bit of history and facts about the city of Stuttgart.  Your child will see inside the factory and learn how a car is built, including how it is designed, and the five-step painting process it has to go through.  You will witness how a car is assembled and then inspected to make sure it is built correctly.  Each of these steps has words that flash on the screen in colorful boxes that show the different objects with the appropriate titles.  This will help your child learn new words that they may not have heard before. 

Your child will have lots of questions about different activities in the video, and probably about the different terms that are used to describe the process.  You can indulge your child's curiosity by answering the questions as best you can, or by researching the answers together. 

When I watched this video with friend's five year-old son John, he was very curious about what each object in the assembly line would become.  I tried to help him visualize the bigger picture so he could understand each step.  He had lots of questions, but and there were some questions I didn't know the answers to, so we headed out to the library and checked out all the books we could find on building cars.  He enjoyed looking at the books and comparing them to all his car toys.

--Kendall

Filmmaker William VanDerKloot was watching kids' videos with his children. He was disappointed with what he saw... and what he didn't. With a few notable exceptions, most children's videos were poorly done and overly simplistic. "It seemed as if very little effort was put into the research or production of those products," said VanDerKloot. "Many looked like amateur home videos."

Then he got an idea.... A Peabody award-winning director/producer, VanDerKloot decided to produce one himself. The first subject came to him while driving past the Atlanta airport in a car full of children. As they drove down I-75, a giant plane took off overhead. Immediately VanDerKloot was bombarded with questions from the kids, "What kind of plane is that?" How fast is it going?" "How many passengers are in it?" The Big Plane Trip, the first video in The Big Adventure Series®, was born.

But VanDerKloot did not want to make a simplistic video "just for kids." Each subsequent video in the series, is constructed with various levels of information so that an entire family, from the youngest to the oldest, can enjoy and learn something new with every viewing. "There is something that happens when you become a parent," says VanDerKloot. "You begin to look at the world through the eyes of a child. Suddenly the normal becomes the extraordinary and you see things in a whole new way."

The Big Adventure Series® shows how things work with a child's sense of wonder. And who better to critique an adventure-in-progress than kids themselves. The team at Little Mammoth holds a number of screenings for children's groups while videos are in their rough edit stage. Utilizing the input, the videos are modified. The results are productions that have received national acclaim from the critics, and most importantly, from families and children.

This hard work has paid off. The BIG Adventure Series®, which is now sixteen titles strong, has received dozens of awards and citations from such organizations as Parent's Choice, Kids First!, Video Librarian, CINE, and International Monitor Awards.