As I discuss in my essay on puppetry and child bilingualism, one of the benefits of investing time and energy in creating "authentic" puppet characters is that, with the right prompts and set-ups, the child will then narrate and explain things to a puppet who is not "in the know," leading to a lot more L2 production than if it's just you and the child, since your child assumes you already know everything. ;)
I started doing this kind of thing after about six months, after J was capable of putting whole L2 sentences together. Every so often we would get a new puppet, and of course J needed—and wanted!—to explain everything to the new arrival all over again.
In the last couple of years, I have not done a lot of puppetry. That has changed with Gustav. Never has J been so excited about a new arrival, and in the last couple of weeks, mostly at J's initiative, we have been all over town showing Gustav out favorite spots and things to do. He has also wanted to read a lot (in German!) with Gustav ...
... and has been discoursing at length and in great detail on his favorite video games and movies. Just this morning we took a long walk and talked Star Wars—probably about an hour of more or less continual chat from J—talking about all the characters and discussing the story. Two days ago it was How to Train Your Dragon, which I brought home in German this summer:
Tomorrow he returns to school and I to work, so there soon won't be as much time for this. But it has been great and very L2-productive.
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