When I teach students git I show them init, status, add commit, diff, and log. That's all I focus on for several weeks.
That's enough to track changes to your own projects, see the benefit of tracking what you've changed, and build the habit of commiting frequently. IME, adding anything more about remotes and branches is overwhelming to the point they don't bother with git because they aren't going to distinguish the fundamentals from those more complex features.
Obviously branches and remotes are vital in real development, you just can't expect them to learn it all from the start.