Wednesday 30 April 2014

The Brinkman Adventures - TOS Review


We love learning through stories so being offered the chance to review The Brinkman Adventures - Season 2: Episodes 13-24  by The Brinkman Adventures was great, not only do they educate and entertain but they also teach the importance of values and have honest discussions about how God uses people to do his work.
The Brinkman Adventures is a radio drama based on true missionary stories. It follows the large Brinkman family as they visit missionaries worldwide. During their journey the Brinkmans' experience various problems and setbacks, but God’s hand is over them, There are 12 episodes in season two and each episode lasts approximately 25 mins so there is over 5 hours of stories. They are available as CD’s or digital download – we got the download to review.


I decided to use these in the car because the length tied in perfectly with our 30 min car journeys to and from our various activities but they would work equally well in the home as a group story time or family night
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Their first adventure starts at their local water hole, where the children find a huge gold ring and the excitement grows from there as they travel to Hong Kong, Mexico, a pirate island, a French castle and beyond.

A couple of the episodes do tackle sensitive issues (like slavery) but there is a verbal cautionary note prior to those episodes – I did choose to listen to them prior to trying them out on the girls so I was prepared to deal with questions and concerns that it bought up.

The girls LOVE them. They have bugged me constantly to listen to the ‘next one’ even to the point where they wanted to go home early just to listen to the next episode : )

I liked that the episodes occurred all over the world – it was a great, secret geography study. I loved how they have a gift for making you feel like you are right there with them living the adventure and making those choices. The best feature for us is that they are all based on real stories and they have a links where you can read more about the real stories they are based on.

We did struggle a little jumping in with season two and I would have preferred to start with the first season so we had their full story but otherwise couldn’t find fault with these. They tackle sensitive issues like still birth and slavery sensitively and introduce missionary work in an engaging way.

I asked the girls what their favourite episode was and we have a divided camp – Lilly and Sunflower loved the story where they smuggle Bibles to where they are needed. While Rose and Tulip’s favourite was the French castle mystery.

The Brinkman Adventures is available on 4 CD’s for $25 or $17 for downloads. It is suggested for all ages and it worked very well across our age range (5-11) as they were all hooked.

You can see what my crew mates thought over at the TOS Blog




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