Recent versions of NetBeans do very well with Python. Eclipse with Pycon isn’t bad. Not sure why you think Python is too big and complicated. Seems ideal to me.

To start at the beginning (flashlights and morse code, switches, relays, telegraphs, and, or circuits, ... modern computers, check out “Code,” by Charles Petzold.

Carter Sande, young coauthor of Hello World, did a guest video lesson on the Young Programmers Podcast: http://young-programmers.blogspot.com/2009/11/carter-sande-presents-pythoncard.html

I recommend Scratch (MIT), Alice (Carnegie Mellon) and Python, for teaching kids. I have some video lessons here: http://young-programmers.blogspot.com/ on those three, plus Jython and Pygame, Scala and Lift.