Teaching Pinyin and Characters together vs Teaching Pinyin then Characters I'm designing a curriculum to teach middle school students elementary Chinese. When I started learning, I began with Traditional Chinese characters and pinyin together on day one. I'm not so sure the typical student would like getting thrown into having to remember both pinyin and characters. 

That being said, I was going to start off teaching basic grammatical structures and vocabulary using pinyin only. Have them practice those words and get used to pinyin as its own entity. Once they're very familiar with pronunciation of pinyin along with the tones, I will later introduce characters (which would force me to reintroduce the pinyin as they learn the basic characters).

But I'm debating if it would be better to just start off with both?

What are your thoughts on learning? Did any of you start off learning pinyin, then phase in to characters later on?

Thanks!
When I was first learning Chinese, we were using the New Practical Chinese Reader series of books. In them:


Dialogues and vocabulary are presented with both characters and pinyin.
You were only expected to memorize a subset of the characters used in a given chapter (e.g., in the first dialogue, you only had to learn how to write 你, 好, and 吗 or something like that).
Eventually you get weaned off pinyin for the dialogues and in some of the vocabulary parts.