Last year I added a touch of programming to my 9 year old son's home school activities. We tried several learning tools, starting with Scratch. I don't have anything negative to say about the various options we tried. However, the most positive exercise was him going through the "Prof Stef" tutorial built into Pharo. He really got into exploring and interacting with objects using tradition Smalltalk inspectors and workspaces (Do it, Show it, Inspect it). He loved that he could close the environment and open it the next day with all his play right where it was.
As a father, I loved that I didn't feel like a fraud as I could easily help him dig around and answer just about any question on what's really going on.