Dear Ravi, here is a small suggestion. I think one might emphasize as soon as possible that the subschemes of an affine scheme $Spec A$ exactly correspond to the set of ideals of the ring $A$.( I don't know if this is deep or tautological: probably both.) This allows one to illustrate many of the strange and frightening features of scheme theory as compared to tamer geometric structures (that subschemes are not determined by subsets, that functions are not determined by their values, etc) without adding the complications due to sheaves and gluing. I remember it took me a long time to realize this and when I did I lost some of my fear of schemes.