I started my kids out on simulators for the computer. There are quite a few good, ie - expensive, such as Great Planes' RealFlight, Dave Brown's RCFS, Aerochopper, and a few others. If you're kid handles vid games, these may smooth over those winter months.

I can also suggest the two best freebie simulators - Pre-Flight and FMS. They do a very good job of familiarizing you with controller inputs and flight characteristics, but are limited in their individual plane characteristics. You will have to obtain a "buddy box" controller and a cable (serial, parallel, USB). I used a Futaba 4 channel Skysport to spark my kids interest.

http://n.ethz.ch/student/mmoeller/fms/index_e.html

http://www.preflightsim.com/

My kids started out on a Megatech Merlin setup which is cheaper if you can find it here or maybe eBay. This is in the class of suggested electric, slow flyers. Keep in mind the flight times on some of these slow electrics can be ten minutes or less depending on throttle and battery packs. The other consideration is you have no flight experience starting out, so unless you can find someone to trim and check your electric, you will be crashing your slow flyer quite a bit. This might be a turn off for you or your son. Hopefully the slow speeds will prevent a lot of damage. Replacement parts for almost all of the slow electrics are readily available.

Any experience you and your kid can gain before going to the club field will impress your instructor. Do a lot of reading and searches here on RCU, as you already noticed, a great place to start and stay.