See the famous Banff Springs Hotel in the Canadian Rockies, where Elk relax on the golf course and eagles sour in the sky. You'll learn how the staff of over 2000 people work together to make the Big Hotel work. Visit the kitchen, the reservation center, and the giant boiler room. You'll also discover the outdoors of Banff National Park where you can go on a snowshoe hike, ride on a dog sled, or learn rock climbing from a Swiss mountaineer.

Take your child on an adventure to Banff Springs Hotel in Banff National Park, Canada where they will learn what it is like to stay in a large resort with 800 rooms and nearly 2,000 guests.  The hotel is set in the middle of Canada's first national park, an expansive wilderness filled with animals and incredible views. There are hundreds of jobs involved in running a large resort and your child will get to learn the details of many of them.  Each segment, whether it's about the cooks, the cleaning service, the concierge, or the tour guides, will offer unique information and interesting vocabulary words.  Words flash on the screen as new concepts and images are introduced to help your child associate the tasks and people with the images they are seeing.  The music is upbeat and adventurous, which will help to capture your child's imagination as they follow along and learn many new concepts.

While your child watches this video they will likely be introduced to entirely new ideas and words.  They will surely have questions about the workings of a hotel.  You can feed your child's curiosity by watching along with them and answering their questions.  The video is narrated by children and contain lots of exciting footage and fun facts, so don't be surprised if your child wants to watch it over and over again.

When I watched this movie with five-year-old Lucca, I found he was most impressed by the size of things; the numbers of guests, numbers of towels, and all the food needed to feed so many people.  He wanted to know if I had ever been to a big hotel. When I told him I had, he wanted to know all the details of what it was like. We spent a long time talking about hotels, and it was clear to me that Lucca was very fascinated. He talked about all the things he would do if he could spend the night in a hotel, and was especially excited about the possibility of jumping on the bed and riding the elevators. He decided it might actually be fun to live in a hotel, where you could always get desert, no matter what time of day.

--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.