We have been looking for a personality test that we could do with the whole family, as we want to work at understanding one another a little better. The opportunity to review the Incredible Creatures Interactive Adventure seemed perfect. The subtitle on the book, “Discover Your Family’s God-Given Strengths” certainly appealed to me.

My daughter participates in American Heritage Girls, and one of their newer badges is Together As a Family. To earn this badge at her age, we need to complete a dozen activities together. One of the options in the section “Together We Learn” requires each member of our family to take the same personality test and discuss the results, using what we learn the next time we face a family conflict.

The Incredible Creatures program sounded perfect, as we can do the personality test, but there are also activities to follow up with what we learned that tie into this badge perfectly.

Included in the kit:

• The Incredible Creatures book, which includes instructions to download the next five items.
• Family Adventure Guide
• Discovery Report
• Family Strengths Poster
• Score Card
• Stickers of the four animals
• A puzzle
• Family Activity Booklet

To start things off, I first read through the Family Adventure Guide so that I would be prepared to use this with my family. On a Sunday afternoon, I called everyone together, expecting that we would spend 45 minutes working through the materials. “Everyone” in my household includes four children ages 12 to 20, plus mom and dad.

This guide walked me through the steps to take with my family, and because my children are all older, I read much of the introductory material aloud to them all. The boys knew their baby sister needed us all to do this, but it was still helpful for them to understand the goals of the program. One big goal is to help the children in our lives discover their strengths and weaknesses.

To do this, someone reads the story aloud to the family, pausing at every decision point so that each person can answer, “Which animal made you think inside, that’s what I would do?”

I told my family that this story was intended for younger children, but that I thought it still had value for us.

We went through the book as a family, with everyone giving answers as we went. My family tends to over-analyze everything, so we made a rule that we could not discuss the answer choices as we worked through the book. Once we completed the story, we worked through the process of scoring all our responses.

As a family, we then talked through what everyone was, how each of us answered the questions, and we spent a couple of hours talking through which answer we thought was appropriate for each other. In a few cases, that resulted in some changes to answers. We were all surprised to see that four hours had gone by.

Later, we completed the Discovery Reports, which give each person a record of which animal (or animals) fit them best. I ended up with a big sticker for Golden Retriever and a small Beaver sticker.

We went on to create our Family Strengths Poster, which showed that there is a lot of Golden Retriever in our family, and the other strong animal is Lion. The poster was fascinating in representing our family dynamics and seeing where each of us fits in the big picture of our home.

The Family Adventure Guide gives plenty of information to help explain the strengths and challenges faced by the various personality types.

There is also a puzzle activity that helps highlight how we work together as a family.

The final piece of my kit is the Family Activity Booklet, which includes a variety of activities to do together as a family. This piece of the set is my favorite. The activities are mostly normal, everyday activities, such as doing chores, visiting a museum, watching movies, or going to the library. There are additional suggestions made for each activity, though, that help to bring out either the value of each individual in the family or some aspect of being a team.

Many of these activities worked for us in completing that “Together as a Family” badge for American Heritage Girls.

Overall, we thought this was a solid product and it spurred some fascinating discussions over a few weeks. This was not something we completed in a day and moved on with life. Even without the activities, we found ourselves referring to the strengths in each other.

I do think this would work best when there are some younger children in the household, but my family found this valuable. My teens thought the story was a bit silly, and I was glad I had prepared them before we started so they expected it to be for younger children.

-Product review by Debra Brinkman, Crew Administrator, The Old Schoolhouse® Homeschool Review Crew, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, June 2019