What is the Best way to introduce your kids to Snowboarding and where?

As you probably already know, there aren't any ski resorts in Texas, at least that I know of. One good place to go is Utah. I know, I know, Utah, but the snow is great and there are some awesome out of the way resorts that aren't too busy. The best way to teach kids is to take them and get them lessons. Once they are comfortable on the board, they will be more likely to try more things. All of the resorts in Utah have incredibly good ski schools and really good instructors too. The best thing to do is take your kids on the bunny hill and on really easy winding green runs that aren't steep. That way they get used to lifts and carving down the runs. And when they fall just make sure that they get back up because it's going to hurt, but they need to get up and keep going. Also, they are going to be really sore so stock up on ibuprofen and make sure that your hotel has a hot tub. The resorts that I can recommend with good pricing are Powder Mountain www.powdermountain.com and Snowbasin which are up in the north part of the state. http://www.skicentral.com/utah.html has information about all of the resorts in Utah. Airfare isn't too bad from Austin to Salt Lake City and hotels in Ogden shouldn't be too bad. But, you'll want to take them somewhere where there aren't a lot of people.

While I don't have the names of specific ski schools or resorts in your neck of the woods (I live in Michigan), I can share how my husband and I introduced our daughter (age 12 at the time) to snowboarding. She expressed an interest in learning, so around Xmas we took her to a ski resort in Michigan (where the hills are not as steep) and enrolled her in a beginning snowboarding class -- 2 hours during one afternoon with an individual instructor. The instructors were older teenagers/young adults and related to the kids very well. The class included the rental of snowboard and boots, and her instructor did a great job of helping her feel comfortable with the process. I highly recommend the one-on-one training to begin with. It only took one lesson for our daughter to feel like she had a handle on basic snowboarding. We ended up buying her a snowboard on sale at the end of the season, and the next winter we enrolled her in an individual lesson again to teach her some more advanced moves. Since then, she's felt more comfortable taking classes with other kids, but she says she would have been too embarrassed to start out in a group situation. There's a lot of falling to start with, but by starting on less-steep slopes, there's little discomfort involved. The best of luck to you. Hopefully, someone else will have an answer about a location in or near Texas.

Big mountains are the best because they have allot of trails at different skill levels. For beginning kids, I recommend they work on strengthening their calves. I started at Steamboat, Colorado. They had great private lessons. The private lessons actually coast less than the group lessons when you have 3 or more people. One major thing: If you take your kids snowboarding down a mountain, don't take them on cat trails. Cat trails are so hard for beginning snowboarders. I fell off the trail several times the first time I tried, and that was after several days on the snow.

And one last word: bananas. (eat alot of bananas)

Sorry, I'm from California, so I don't have any ideas about specific programs, but I do have great advice on how to get them to love the sport and stick with it. Here it is:

No matter how badly they do on the first day, make them go back within a week and try it again. Unless they are somehow amazingly gifted, 99% of the people who try it will not get it at all, will be sore for the next three days in places they didn't even know they had, and will think its so hard they never go again. Unless someone is there to encourage them or they have a real passion for the sport. No one encouraged me, but I had a true passion for it, and I kept going back as much as I could, either with instructors or someone who was patient enough to stay with me part of the day and teach me. It is really easy to learn past a certain point, but they have to stick with it for them to get good enough to enjoy it. My advice for the first day?

1. Don't be tempted to take them on a harder course unless they say its o.k.

2. Tell them to drink lots of water and eat lots of high energy foods to lessen the cramps the next day.

3. Make sure they are constantly keeping their hands balanced out in front of them to even out their weight, and tell them to keep their head looking at the direction of where they are going, and not to look down, or they will fall down a lot more.

well i would take them to bear valley ski resort. they are a fairly small resort and they are family based. we have friendly staff and a whole program based for kids. i work at bear and i teach kids and adults how to snowboard. we have a magic carped. which is basically a big escalator up the easy hill.