Bring creativity, storytelling, and real student engagement into your French classroom with this classroom-tested IPA-style project that students actually remember.

In Mon Monstre, students physically create their own monster using recycled materials, toys, textiles, clay, or found objects, then describe and present their creature entirely in French. What begins as a fun, low-pressure descriptive language project becomes a powerful speaking and writing assessment rooted in creativity, ownership, and communicative language use.

Students practice:

• Physical descriptions
• Personality traits
• Gender and number agreement
• Colors and body parts
• Presentational speaking
• Descriptive writing
• Vocabulary development
• Creativity and storytelling

This project works beautifully as:

• A French 1 or French 2 assessment
• A creative IPA project
• A speaking and writing assessment
• A sub-plan extension project
• A Halloween or seasonal activity
• A post-testing creative reset
• A middle school or high school engagement piece

The project also includes a future narrative extension hook: students can later reuse their monster in Mon Monstre et Moi, a companion passé composé/imparfait storytelling project.

What’s Included:

✔Student instructions

✔ English + French pre-writing pages

✔ Sketch and label pages

✔ Speaking preparation sheets

✔ Rubrics in English and French

✔ Teacher implementation notes

✔ Suggested pacing timeline

✔ Bonus classroom family album idea

✔ Vocabulary support resources

Best For:

• French 1
• French 2
• Novice Mid to Intermediate Low
• Grades 6–12
• ACTFL-aligned classrooms
• IPA-style assessment
• Creative communicative instruction

Teacher Notes:

This project has been classroom-tested for over twenty years and consistently produces strong student buy-in, memorable presentations, and surprisingly rich target-language output.

Students think they’re building monsters.

You’re actually assessing:

• descriptive language
• vocabulary retrieval
• oral fluency
• agreement accuracy
• presentational communication
• narrative preparation skills

And they have fun doing it!

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