How to Create a Read Aloud Lesson

Created by Matthew, Modified on Mon, 1 Dec, 2025 at 9:31 AM by Matthew

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.