I haven't used it personally, but Cronnix may be the tool that you're looking for.
Alternately, considering that your goal is 'to "soften" the move from the GUI to the terminal', you could use:
http://www.corntab.com/pages/crontab-gui
to both help teach the basics of cron and to ease the transition to the CLI. It uses a graphical web interface to build a line which a user could then be cut and paste into the crontab file.