Celebrating forward progress is a wonderful way to keep your kids motivated to keep progressing in skiing. Here are fives ways we have found to mark our milestones with our kids and students.
Give lots of little sweets to skiers
For mini-milestones like completing a run, we use Black Forest Gummy Bears shamelessly, as a quick pick me up or a celebration of completing a minor accomplishment in a lesson. If you want to get one more chairlift ride in with your kid, Gummies are your friend! You can get them HERE. These are a lifesaver.
Be careful though — make sure you do not keep unopened packages in your jacket pockets before you wash your jacket. Probably will not be an issue for you careful and prudent parents, but for anyone like me, best to double check one more time before washing!
Think of ways to create and celebrate Levels
At Sky Tavern Junior Ski Program in northern Nevada, where we volunteer, we use a level system to mark achievements. Kids get a level card, and get a hole punch thorough each level they pass. Kids get hungry to get punched up. You can replicate this at your home mountain by using milestones by trail successfully skied, or skills learned. I will include ideas for levels in a future post in the ski lessons sections, and if you do not have a card system, think about cool names like Pony, Horse, Unicorn, and Pegasus to mark levels of achievement! A few helmet stickers that come with these names will go a LONG way.
Or, maybe it is time for a Dance Party! Check out the US Cross Country Team getting what they are calling ‘funky’.
For our kids, when they ‘level up’, we make a big deal about it. We tell other adults in their life to congratulate them with a high five and an ‘attaboy’. We get them an extra sticker to choose for their helmet or skis. We let them pick the dinner or lunch the next day. Overall, we try to make sure they feel like they have ‘graduated’ to a new level and instill pride in the hard work they had to put in to improve!
Make clubs with easily achievable milestones
I love skiing in the trees and through powder, so as my kids got older, I created a fake club for ski milestones that included elements of powder, trees, jumps, and safety. We would pick a skill each afternoon and work on it together, and it motivated the kids to try something new each day.
When they achieved skiing confidently getting down an un-groomed run, they got to pick their next skill. This can be a huge motivation, particularly if you are able to use these levels to help get you off the SAME run every day. Your kids will find a run they love with a couple jumps they want to hit every run of every day, and if you can find a way to bounce between something comfortable to something that pushes them, you will be less bored and have a lot more fun together.
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