How to Create a Read Aloud Lesson

Read Aloud lessons are an excellent way to help students practice reading fluency, intonation, and pronunciation with longer texts. When you create a Read Aloud lesson, ELSA automatically extracts key vocabulary from your passage to create a warm-up exercise, preparing students for the main reading task.

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1. Getting Started

• Navigate to the Curriculum tab on the left-hand menu.

• Click the + Create Lesson button in the top-right corner.

• Select Generate Manually from the dropdown menu.

• On the "Create Content" page, click on the Read Aloud tab.

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2. Add Your Reading Passage

• Copy the paragraph or text passage you want to use for the lesson from your source material.

• Paste the text into the content box.

Pro Tip

To create multiple Read Aloud lessons from a single block of text, simply insert *** (three asterisks) on a new line where you'd like to split the text. Each part will become a separate lesson.

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3. Review and Customize Your Lesson

• Click the Generate button.

• On the review screen, you can customize the lesson before saving it. For each lesson, you will find:

  • An Exercise section containing the full text for students to read.

  • A Warm Up section with key vocabulary automatically identified by ELSA from the text.

• You can make the following adjustments:

  • Give your lesson a Title.

  • Remove any unwanted words from the Warm Up section by clicking the 'x' next to them.

  • Click Play Audio to preview the audio for the passage. You can also click Re-Generate Audio if needed.

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4. Finalize Your Lesson

• Once you are happy with the lesson, click Confirm.

• After the lesson is successfully created, a confirmation window will appear.

• You can then choose to Assign to classes immediately or Go to Library to save the lesson for later use.

? Best Practices for Passage Length

To ensure the best experience for your students and optimal app performance, please consider the following regarding text length:

• Recommended Length: We recommend keeping each passage between 100 and 250 words.

• Why keep it short?

  • Student Focus: Longer passages are significantly more difficult for students to complete in one take without making mistakes.

  • Processing Speed: Longer passages take more time for our servers to process and generate a score, which may cause delays for the student.

Note on Word Limits: While the system creates a limit of roughly 500 words, this capacity is designed to allow you to paste longer texts and split them into multiple lessons (using the *** method mentioned above). We strongly advise against using the full 500-word limit for a single Read Aloud passage.