See how reporters cover the White House, a Big League baseball game, and road test a new sportscar. Learn how a photograph gets put in the paper, and how printing plants all over the world print the newspaper early every morning. You'll discover how all the people work together to get the latest news to millions of readers every day.

This video gives your child an inside look at all of the jobs required to produce a daily newspaper. In particular, they will learn about one of the largest circulating newspapers in America, USA TODAY.  They will discover that a newspaper has a lot of components such as designing, writing, editing, photography and printing. Each segment is introduced with terms that flash on the screen to help your child associate the appropriate images and concepts.  They will learn how the stories are written and produced and each person's role in the process from the reporter to the person who delivers the newspaper each day. 

As your child watches the video, they will have questions about the events taking place in the newsroom and the printing plant.  You can make this a fun and interactive learning experience by watching along with them and explaining what they are seeing.  This video is full of exciting information and facts that will have your child wanting to watch it over and over again.

When I watched the video with five year-old Lucca I noticed that he was most curious about the different quantities such as the large amount of products used to produce the newspaper. He wanted to know where all the paper came from.  I explained that paper came from trees but I could tell he was trying to figure out how a tree turned into paper.  I took the opportunity to explain to him that newspapers are recycled to make other products.  I showed him my notebook which said on the back that it was made from recycled paper. "It is possible that my notebook was once a newspaper, which was once a tree," I told Lucca. We spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the house looking for recycled products.

--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.