This fall, I helped teach programming to my son's grade 8 class. They had done Scratch before, and wanted to learn "real" programming, so we taught them a subset of Python. It turned out really well. With basically just for-loops and if-statements they were able to write quite a bit. I liked that the concepts they learn were the actual fundamentals I use every day at work when I program in Python.

I wrote it up here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/12/17/programming-for-grade-8/