Should We Pin the Yin? Part II

Talking to colleagues about teaching is like spontaneous professional development sessions.  I love to hear what they say.  How their ideas inspire me to develop my own teaching techniques and classroom activities!  

It all started as a textbook discussion.  Then, the thing that plagues a lot of us came up:  Should we pin the yin, when and how?  My colleague spends a considerable amount of time on pinyin before introducing characters when she teaches high school students; but start both at the same time with the younger students (middle grades, elementary). She noticed that when she teaches pinyin and introduced characters at the same time, her students do not learn their pinyin and tones quite as well.  However, she shared a great activity which seemed to help her students with pinyin and kept up their interest level -- she used all the 'problematic' pinyin in an interesting dialogue and had students act it out. 

Last year, for my non-heritage students at NHCLS, I taught mostly by sound (listening and speaking), and added some simple characters for the kids to start appreciating this different writing system.  I wanted them to be familiar with the sounds, and be able to learn the pronunciation like native kids, before teaching them how to pinyin.  We spent one whole year without pinyin.  

Now, in their second year, I am going to put my pilot class to test and see if they really will learn pinyin in a flash.  They will get their dialogue in pinyin, and they will already understand a big part of it.  This is very exciting.  The new school year is when we put all our planning to work.  Test your hypothesis!