Go behind-the-scenes on an international flight on a major airliner. See passenger-restricted areas such as the cockpit, control tower, baggage handling and the immense flight kitchens.

In this video your child will learn the steps that are necessary to prepare a passenger jet for international travel.  The plane is a Boeing 747 and it's headed to Zurich, Switzerland.  Everything from fuel to food must be carefully calculated and prepared for long distance air travel, and your child will be fascinated by all the details. There are many jobs involved in airplane travel such as flight attendants, cooks, air traffic controllers, pilots, ground crews and baggage handlers.  The video shows that each job is important and unique and must be done for the whole system to work smoothly.  The names of the planes and titles of the people flash on the screen with bright colors, and upbeat music. 

As your child watches this video they will likely have lots of questions about what they are seeing. You can encourage your child's curiosity by watching the video with them and discussing the different aspects of air travel. You can help them with new vocabulary words and large numbers, since these concepts might be new to them.

Five year-old Lucca loves planes and has many toy and model planes. He was fascinated with the video and actively participated by playing with his own planes while watching. The large number of passengers, gallons of fuel, and amount of food were intriguing to Lucca. He asked me lots of questions about the numbers, especially how much a thousand was. At first I struggled to find something that had at least a thousand, and we ended up counting the words in his mom's cookbook, as well as leaves on the bushes and blades of grass.

--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.