This Winter Term course is designed for the students traveling to Málaga, Spain during the Winter Term. The course will include the study of Geography, including kingdoms, regions, and important topographic features, as well as the history and culture of civilizations that have inhabited the Iberian Peninsula. Students will learn about the monarchy and government leading to the present day as well. The novel, The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, will provide context for the travel, along with Spanish language instruction necessary for the trip.

Do you love food? Do you love working with and learning about food? Do you love EATING food? Then this is the class for you! Food is Love will not only teach you some basics of cooking, it will help you to appreciate what it takes to create healthy and tasty dishes. We will work a bit with our very own chefs in the Leelanau kitchen, researching and creating menus, baking delicious desserts, and learning the culinary basics.  In this class we will cook…but we will also look at the history and cultural impacts of food. In addition, we will go on field trips to local favorites like Oryana, The Cheese Lady, and Grocer’s Daughter Chocolates. Watching cooking-related movies and reading a variety of food blogs and articles will round out this exciting course. Food is Love will open your eyes and your tastebuds to the wonderful world of food.

This is a class for artists, storytellers, and those who always dreamed of writing and illustrating stories. We will begin by learning the basic skills of telling a captivating story by using a strong voice, imagery, and more. Students will then develop a visual style that brings their story to life using materials such as pen and pencil, painting, collage, or digital art. They will also learn how to develop or choose a font that works to pull the whole piece together. Collectively, students will create a book, a collection of short stories. We will gain knowledge from experts in our area by going on field trips and having guest speakers. We are looking for those with a creative spirit, willingness to try new things, and those who have an interest in collaborating with others. We will end our term with an opportunity to share our stories with the Leelanau community in our Celebration of Winter Term.

This course will be a deep dive into the pop-culture, history, and lasting impact of the 1980s and ‘90s. The ‘80s and ‘90s were a period of paradoxes. In many ways it was a time of hope, yet it also produced “the prozac generation.” We’ll engage with these paradoxes through experience, discussion, and reading. We’ll watch MTV and listen to music like punk, rap, and new wave, view films like “The Princess Bride” and “Terminator,” dress in neon tops and bleached denim, look at art from the AIDS quilt to Damien Hirst, and play original NES games. Students will also be exposed to ‘80s and ‘90s schools of thought and art like postmodernism, 3rd wave feminism, and neo-expressionism. Perhaps even more importantly, we’ll learn about how all these movements in culture, the arts, entertainment, and fashion paralleled historical events and social movements whose repercussions are still being felt today. From the collapse of the Soviet Union’s influence on the war in Ukraine to early hip hop’s relationship to BLM to the rise of the internet, the class will chart some of the most prominent events of our times to their roots in these pivotal decades. Of course, we’ll do all this while eating iconic ‘80s and ‘90s Cool Ranch Doritos, Combos, Tato Skins, Warheads, and Sunny D.

The basic structure of a song usually includes three different elements that all come together to create the song; rhythm and chords, melody and lyrics. As a class, we will be developing skills in each of these three areas and then learn how to put them together to create a song. The rhythm section includes all of the background instruments, so we will begin with learning basic skills on several different instruments including: the guitar, bass, piano, mandolin, ukulele, violin and drums. The melody is often found in the voice, so we will also cover vocal skills: vocal ranges, sound production and how to sing with a microphone. The poetry in lyric writing is also important to a song, so we will cover basic writing techniques, rhyme schemes, lyrical meter, and writing to an audience. A few basic theory concepts will help us put all of these skills together to create several songs, both as a class and as an individual. Each class period includes time for writing lyrics, practice time on several different instruments, and individual and group songwriting time. At the end of the winter term, we will perform a concert of our original songs.

This course will be an intensive mathematical exploration of advanced mathematical concepts and modeling for financial applications. We will explore trigonometric relations, identities and use of trig functions to explore rate of change through differential calculus, and visualization of trigonometric functions on polar and Cartesian coordinate systems. Additional topics may include circular functions and radian measure, graphical analysis of the trigonometric functions, k trigonometric identities, and equations, the inverse trigonometric functions, equations arising from conic sections, including for a circle, ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola. A survey of limits, continuity, and the differential and integral calculus with applications in business and economics will be incorporated throughout the course, with advanced algebraic modeling and partial differential equations used for financial application. Skill drills will be part of class, starting with a review of algebra, functions and their graphs, including polynomial and rational functions; systems of linear equations, linear programming, exponential and logarithmic equations, partial differentiation, separable and linear differential equations.

We will spend the Winter Term weeks working with watercolor paints to learn how they react with water, paper and each other. You do NOT need any art experience to take this class…We will paint because it is fun to create, not because we are trying to make a masterpiece! We will paint every day, sometimes from still life or photographs and sometimes plein aire. In addition, we will watch tutorial videos of master painters to find techniques that we can copy and adapt to our styles.

Snow Sports is a winter term class that is for the student who needs and wants to be outside every day. We spend every afternoon on the slopes of Crystal Mountain enjoying the beautiful Northern Michigan winter. This is a great class for those that are experienced skiers and riders as well as those beginners who have a desire to learn. We will head to Crystal Mountain every day right after lunch. This will also be your afternoon activity. We will also be studying the ski industry, general strength and conditioning, and skiing and snowboarding techniques.

This class will cover the history of LGBTQ representation in film and television.  The class focuses on American media, but we will compare examples from international cinema as well.  We’ll watch excerpts, full tv episodes, and movies from the very first depictions of queer and transgender people in media to the more fully developed, but sometimes still problematic portrayals of today.  This course also provides an introduction to concepts from both Film Theory and Queer Theory.  We’ll learn about such phenomena as the gaze, gay and transgender media tropes, virtue signaling, camp, coding, disidentification, and queerbaiting.  We’ll discuss the importance of representation and how the lack or prevalence of representation can affect a community’s identity and self-perception.  Using media examples, we’ll also learn about the fluctuating attitudes of broader society toward LGBTQ people from the 1920s to today.  Students will be expected to take notes, participate in class discussions and projects, and do a final presentation.

What better time to bring more color and light into our environment than in the gray days of winter! In this class each student will design and construct a lamp out of copper and stained glass. This class is for students who want to work with their hands and improve their designing skills. Students need to be able to invest time in planning and commit to working out one design. Techniques used in this class will be: folding, riveting, low temp solder, sawing, glass work, filling and finishing techniques. Although the majority of our time will be spent in the studio we will also visit local artists and galleries to learn about what is involved in a career as a studio artist or gallery owner. How does an artist structure their time and manage their business? Students will leave this class with a new level of patience and an appreciation for the crafts as well as a beautiful light to remind them of their winter term experience.

“Winter in the Greenhouse ” is an English credit course with a science/sociology/community service focus. In this course we will be creating a legacy native plant nursery collection in our greenhouse. We will be establishing partnerships with local organizations committed to conservation and biodiversity such as the Grand Traverse Conservation District, The Tipp of the Mitt Watershed Council, Leelanau Conservation District, the Michigan Forestry Assistance Program, Michigan State University Extension and others. We will be blogging, writing correspondences, interviewing, grant writing, taking field trips and making informative video presentations. In addition to the activism focus, we will be exploring our experience internally by reflecting daily through journaling, poetry and lyrical expressions. This hands-on course will also introduce students to healthful greenhouse practices including vermiculture with red wigglers that increase our sustainable actions on campus. We’re going to have fun!

In this course, we will use the Apple TV phenomenon Ted Lasso (2020-2023) as a case study in understanding the effects that positive attitudes can have on a community. In addition to looking at the characters and plot lines, we will also try to identify our own Leelanau core values in each episode. Other fun activities will include learning how to bake Ted’s famous shortbread, having a dress like Keeley day, and learning some basic football (soccer) skills. We will not swear as much as Roy Kent does, but we may learn to grunt like him. We will also look at novels, short stories, memoirs, and articles that promote positive thinking and will engage in daily gratitude exercises to begin and end class.