Now that my child has spent one year, her 6th grade year, immersed in learning Traditional, rather than Simplified, I wanted to post an update... It was not a difficult transition. She was old enough to understand what was happening and ambitious enough to want to take on the challenge.
When we started MI in kindergarten, I had no idea what Simplified was all about. By the time we made it to 4th grade, my own brain could no longer make out Traditional characters.
But as one advances, many of the Simplified and Traditional characters are, indeed, one and the same - i.e., there is no difference in their written form. I don't know when or why... but it seems like often enough that progressing to Traditional does matter at some point in your kid's Chinese literacy development.
My child has transitioned this past school year, to the point of not necessarily knowing how to read Simplified characters at first glance. So we'll spend the summer reading Simplified texts with a converter table from the back of the textbook. Both the Hanban and Jinan University textbooks have this in the back of each. So we'll just rip it out and put it next to her while she reads.
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