Bash as it is what I’m most familiar with. Having an eye out on the https://amber-lang.com/ that compiles to bash for future scripting purposes.

Indeed, haste makes waste

If the MacBook is an Apple Silicon Mn processor one, Asahi is the obvious choice

For other cases

My first suggestion would be to try the distribution you used in WSL

Second would be Linux Mint, can’t go wrong with either of Ubuntu edition or the Debian edition

Third would be OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Though a rolling distribution, with easy rollback commands, any unusable state can easily be left behind

OpenSUSE newcomer here, from decades of Debian and Debian derived systems.

I vote Debian with Xfce4 for the base system with Nix or Guix to let the kids freely install and play with software as required without requiring root. Stable release should be good. Testing release if time and resources to keep up with the updates are at hand.

Along with teaching the kids computers and software, please also consider teaching them how the Debian packagers, maintainers, developers, testers, admins, etc work and might never meet others in the project whilst releasing a great system every couple of years.

+1

And

In the off chance the files are not under git or some other VCS, might be a good idea to add the -b option to backup