Travel to Hawaii and visit active volcanoes. Learn how they erupt and see how lava makes the island bigger every day. Watch an expert demolition team implode a 22-story building, and go behind-the-scenes to see how the team makes it happen. Watch supersonic jets fly faster than the speed of sound, and discover how sound waves work and how your ears hear.

This educational video is a fun way to learn alongside your child. The Big Boom explores sounds and different types of 'big booms' in the world. Viewers see amazing real life images of erupting volcanoes, a building being demolished, and supersonic jets breaking the sound barrier. The DVD is well directed toward children; a child narrates while a second child makes occasional humorous comments, and new words are printed on the screen, pronounced, and thoroughly explained. Some concepts, such as what sound waves are and how they enter your ear to create sound, are explained through cartoon pictures to help children relate. The real life images, like erupting volcanoes and buildings being blown up are extremely effective on their own. Professionals, such as engineers and geologists are also interviewed.

Watching this DVD with your child is a great way to show that learning is fun at all ages. It also makes you available for questions, which they are bound to have. They may want to know if you have ever seen a volcano or heard a sonic boom. The three major 'booms' also cover lessons on nature, community team work, cleaning up after oneself, and the uses of technology. You can emphasize these activities by pointing them out gently (see how well they are all working together to pick up the rubble of the building) and applying them to your child's life (it's like when you clean up your Legos when you're done playing with them).

I watched this DVD with my four-year-old niece, and we paused it frequently so she could ask questions or we could discuss something further - she had a LOT of questions. She understood the concept of being able to 'feel' sounds; she said, "I feel dad's music when it's loud," referring to the bass. She wanted to know if lava was as hot as the sun, what sulfur dioxide smells like, what implosion means, and if she can fly a supersonic jet when she grows up. It was a very educational afternoon!

--Audra

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.