Arsène Lupin

The two students in Fay’s highest-level French class, French 3A, practiced their reading comprehension and writing skills this month with a comic strip project inspired by the adventures of Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin is a gentleman thief, master of disguise, and the fictional hero of a series of short stories created by the French writer Maurice Leblanc in the early 1900s. 

As a culminating project of the Arsène Lupin unit, students chose a scene from one of the stories to depict in an eight-panel comic book page. They practiced paraphrasing the action by writing at least ten sentences in French to narrate the scene. This challenged students to summarize without directly quoting the book and to use transition words appropriately to create a smoothly flowing story. Each comic had to incorporate at least five new vocabulary words, use correct verb conjugation, and apply all the grammar rules they had previously learned. Because it is a comic strip, students also had to put significant effort into illustrating their story.

The students presented their finished comic strips to one another and to French Teacher Erin Overstreet, explaining the action and dialogue in each panel.  The project required students to deepen their comprehension while challenging their speaking and writing skills as they recounted the narrative using their own vocabulary and grammar structures. Ultimately, this assignment helped students bridge the gap between writing isolated sentences and expressing themselves in rich and fluent French.