Curiosity Quest DVD #hsreviews

Are your kids constantly asking you questions?  Maybe questions that you don’t know how to answer?  Or about things you really don’t care/know about?  My kids recently got to review two dvd’s from Curiosity Quest.  We received DVD Combo Pack: Swimmers of the Sea(salmons, sea turtles, penguins) and DVD Combo Pack: Produce(mushrooms, cranberries, orange packing).  

Curiosity Quest offers DVD’s to help you and your children learn.  Each of our dvd’s features three episodes of the popular PBS show.  That’s right!  If you child likes what they see on these DVD’s you can go online and find more or check out your local PBS station to see if they air the program.   Each of the dvd’s we received to review retail on their website for $24.95.  They also offer several other dvd’s online for purchase as well.  This program is geared towards ages 7-14 but works for more than that in my opinion.

DVD Combo Pack:  Swimmers of the Sea offers sessions gives a glimpse of salmons, sea turtles, and penguins and is available for purchase from the Curiosity Quest Store.   My kiddos really enjoyed this dvd.  They adore animals and loved finding out interesting facts about some of their favorites.  

The Sea Turtles were a favorite.  We have seen them in our zoo in the aquarium with the sharks and such and the kids have always loved how big they are.  Now they know more about them and how big they really are!  We have family who lives in Florida and the kids are now planning the perfect vacation to include visiting family, playing in the Gulf of Mexico, and visiting the turtle hospital.  I think I may have to look a little closer at the distance of these places though.  Could make for quite the drive!

Before we started the penguin segment I asked my kids about penguins.  Of course, they told me that penguins are black and white and live in the cold.  That they can swim but not fly.  Well they were partly correct.  We learned about a special type of penguin who actually live in warm climates!  These are the type that they have in the southern California Monterey Bay Aquarium that we visited with the show.  They are the Magellanic penguins from South America and South Africa.  We loved watching them feed the penguins and my kids can’t wait to go to our local zoo and see if the penguins there eat like the penguins on the video.  These penguins typically will not eat their food after it touches the ground.

The last animal we learned about on this dvd was the salmon.  My kids really didn’t know much about salmon other than it’s a fish and we like to eat them occasionally.  They(and I) were shocked by the size of these fish.  We also did not know that there were that many varieties of Salmon just up in Alaska!  It is our conclusion that the salmon life is definitely a tough one!  I know that there are some fish hatcheries(not for salmon) here in our state and we now have plans to visit one for a field trip sometime in the next year.  

DVD Combo Pack:  Produce shares about mushrooms, orange packing, and cranberries and is also available for purchase through the Curiosity Quest Store.  While my kids liked this dvd as well, it did not hold their attention as much as the one with animals.  We enjoy eating these foods, but it definitely was not as attention grabbing as the animals were.

Learning about mushrooms was fun.  We watched about how they grow mushrooms and talked about how the mushrooms we like to pick in the spring grow in the wild and how their growing habitats differ.  Now we plan to go mushroom hunting for morels in the next month when they pop up.  We might even try our hand at growing some varieties of mushrooms.

Oranges are always a hit around here!  This part was probably the favorite of the kids.  They recognized several of the oranges that were talked about that they knew(love to eat them) and then of course they started out with the questions.  Can we grow oranges?  When can we buy oranges again?  etc.  Oh and my oldest asked me several times if we can ask questions for the show.  So they will probably be submitting questions soon.  They were greatly impressed that someone was paying attention to the questions of children.  

The last section of the produce dvd was about cranberries.  Watching the harvesting of cranberries from what it used to be to what it is now was interesting.  It used to be such a labor intensive thing and now it is done in minutes with the invention of better equipment.  No longer do people have to stand out and handpick the cranberries.  My kids decided they do not want to work with cranberries.  They didn’t think that watching a conveyor of cranberries and picking out the bad ones would be much fun at all.  I don’t think they will ever be able to sit still for that long!

There are many other DVD’s available highlighting a variety of subjects.  Each episode is 30 minutes in length and shares interesting and some relatively unknown facts that your kids will enjoy learning about.  Host Joel Greene will lead your children into unknown worlds on each episode.  Each episode is unscripted and can include fun animal actions as well as educational exploration.  Curiosity Quest is also available on many local PBS channels airing over 100 episodes.  While the series is geared towards kids ages 7-14, I feel that other ages can enjoy and learn from it as well.  All of my children watched these.  They are ages 3-9.  I even watched these with my kids and learned new things!  Imagine that!  Even an adult can learn from these dvd’s.  I think it is important that when we have a dvd curriculum or dvd series that we get for our kids that we watch it as well.  You never know what the dvd is going to say or what new information it will present that your kids will have questions about.  

You can visit and learn more about Curiosity Quest by visiting them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.   If you enjoyed my review make sure to check out all the other reviewers on the TOS Main Crew Blog Post.  There were several reviewing families and I’m sure we all came off with something different from our viewings.