I drove an automatic for ten years. Learning to drive stick was pretty difficult for me because my left foot was pretty much vestigial.
The way I teach people who have also come from an automatic background is as follows:
Go to a parking lot. Find level ground, where you can sit without your foot on the brake and still not roll away. Put the clutch in, put the car in first.
Now VERY SLOWLY start lifting off the clutch. Eventually you'll feel the engine start to tug at the car. This is the "engagement point" that manual drivers always talk about. It's different in every car and you have to feel it.
On most cars you can ride this engagement point and the car will slowly start to move forward. You can then slowly start lifting your foot off the clutch entirely and bam, you're in first gear.
(mind you, riding engagement point like this is also known as "slipping the clutch" and isn't very good for a car, but at idle engine power, it's not going to kill anything and is certainly going to do less damage than the other kinds of slippage that learners do--mainly burning up the clutch by giving it too much gas while at the engagement point)
At any point doing this process, feel free to push the clutch back in and hit the brakes to stop the car, put it in neutral, catch your breath, etc.
You keep practicing that in the parking lot until it doesn't scare you anymore, then you start practicing giving it gas while letting the clutch out.
Learning like this seems to be a lot less scary than trying to teach people how to "give it enough gas" or what not right off the bat. So far I'm at a 4-for-4 success rate on this technique. Once people get a bit of a feel for the engagement point and then get first gear down they're usually fine for the rest.
Of course, there's a lot more to learn before you can drive sportingly, but that's the start of it all.