Stop making nursery slides by hand: type a topic, get an animated, narrated lesson — and teach it live

A nursery teacher I work with spends her Sunday evenings in Canva. She builds the week's slides by hand — finding a picture of an apple, resizing it, adding a letter, finding a bee, resizing it — and by Monday morning she has a lesson she will use once. When I asked what her slides were missing, she did not say “AI”. She listed seven things: animation, graphics and characters, video, GIFs, sound, games, and colour. This article is about what it looks like when all seven are handled for her, and the lesson then runs on every child's own device while she teaches it.

Everything below is a real, checkable feature. Every screenshot was taken automatically from the product by a browser test, not drawn. Where something is not finished, it says so.

Not text. A nursery child cannot read, and an LKG child is only just starting. A slide for a three-year-old is a picture and a voice; anything written on it is for the teacher. So the first thing a lesson builder for this age has to get right is to stop producing bullet points — and most slide tools, including the AI ones, cannot stop.

The second thing is that the lesson must be played, not watched. A four-year-old's attention does not survive a twelve-slide presentation. It survives “tap the red apple”, a star when she gets it right, and a character who reacts. That is what she meant by gamification, and it is the thing that separates a lesson from a slideshow.

Here is how each of her seven gaps is closed, in her order.

Eleven steps, and the first four take about a minute. The documentation page walks through every one with a screenshot; the short version is this.

1. Sign in and open Presentations.
2. Add the Nursery & kids deck module (a monthly add-on with a 14-day trial — pricing below).
3. Click Nursery & kids deck. The builder opens with a kid audience already chosen.
4. Choose the audience: Nursery, LKG–UKG, or Class 1–5. This decides how much text a slide may carry.
5. Choose a look, or leave it on “You decide” and each deck comes back in a different one of the twelve.
6. Type the topic — “the letter A”, “washing hands”, “shapes around us” — and any notes. Or upload last year's worksheet, PDF or PowerPoint and the lesson is built from that.
7. Two outlines come back: one story-led with a character, one plain and professional.
8. Pick one. Edit, reorder or delete slides if you like.
9. Generate. The lesson is written, the art is found and credited, the games are built, the voice lines are added, and every slide is measured to fit any screen.
10. The deck is in your workspace. Present it, edit any slide, download it, or open it full screen.
11. Or skip the building entirely: ten ready-made lessons are in the catalogue — pick one, add a word where it asks, and it builds.

Big. The type on a kid deck is roughly double the size of a normal presentation, because it is being read from the back of a room by someone who is only just learning to. A nursery slide is a picture, a mascot, and a spoken line; the words on it are the teacher's script, printed small underneath so she does not need a notes view.

The games are the point. A tap-the-picture round shows a question and two to four tiles; a right tap earns a star, confetti and a “Well done!”, and a wrong tap gets a gentle “Try again!” and stays open — wrong is never punished at this age. A peekaboo round shows cards the class opens one by one, with a cheer when the last one is found.

Every deck reads itself aloud. When the teacher presses Start the class, the browser's own voice reads each slide's line as it comes into view — no microphone, no recording, nothing to upload. The speaker button on every slide mutes the whole deck (narration and chimes together), because a teacher who wants the room quiet means all of it.

Because a projector at the front of a room is a screen twenty children look at from twenty distances, and the four at the back stop looking first. When the same deck is on every child's own phone or tablet, they are all at the front. This is the part that turns slides into a lesson.

It works like this. In a live class, the teacher opens the Slides tab, picks a deck, and presses Show to students. Every child in the room gets a Slides tab on their own screen, showing the same deck — and their screen follows hers. When she moves to the next slide, so does the whole room. Nobody is three slides ahead answering a question the class has not reached.

Nobody answers until she says so

A deck live on twenty devices is only useful if the teacher still runs the lesson. So questions are closed by default. Children see the tiles dimmed with “Wait for your teacher” until she presses Let students answer — and she can close the question again afterwards. Without that gate, thirty children start tapping through a lesson she has not started; the whiteboard in the same product has exactly the same control for exactly the same reason.

And she finds out who got it

A tap used to score a star in the child's browser and vanish. It now comes back to the teacher: who answered, what they picked, and who has not moved yet — on the slide she is standing on. It is a count and the names still working, not a percentage, because she is looking up at the room, not reading a dashboard. Beside it sits the only advice it ever gives: “most of the class missed this — worth saying again”, or “everyone has it — safe to move on”. It never advances a slide by itself.

At the end of the lesson, one line per child, in the words a parent wants: “Aarav got Find A in Letter A today ⭐”, or “Ishaan joined in with Letter A and had a go — still practising, we'll do it again together.” Print it or save it as a PDF for the bag. Underneath, for the teacher only: which question the room found hard, which is the thing worth knowing before next week.

Two things the report will not do, by design. It carries no percentages and no ranking between children, because a score against a three-year-old's name tells a parent nothing they can act on. And nothing a child got wrong is named as a failure; “still practising” is the whole vocabulary, because at this age that is simply the truth.

The kids-deck add-on covers Nursery, LKG–UKG and Class 1–5, and the three tiers are genuinely different, split by reading ability. Nursery decks are wordless and voice-first. LKG–UKG decks add short text and keep the games. Class 1–5 decks read like a normal lesson with the games alongside — a child who can read still likes to tap.

Older students are covered too, and it is included with every plan rather than the add-on. Class 6–8, 9–12 and college decks get checkpoints: a question mid-lecture that the class answers on their phones, gated by the teacher and counted the same way — the same mechanism as the nursery games without the stars, the confetti or the mascot. Two per deck minimum, placed after the material that answers them.

The teacher writes a code on the board. Each child opens the join page, types the code and their first name, and they are in — no account, no app, nothing to install. Capitals and stray spaces off a whiteboard do not matter; a child types what she sees. The deck itself is one self-contained file, so it runs on old tablets and poor connections, and a downloaded copy keeps the games and the voice working even with the wifi off.

The Nursery & kids deck module is ₹499 a month, with a 14-day free trial. For comparison, printed flashcard packs and worksheet subscriptions for one classroom's worth of material run roughly ₹500 to ₹1,500 a month — and they do not read themselves aloud, follow the teacher's slide, or tell her who got it. Decks for Class 6 and up, with checkpoints, are included in every plan at no extra cost.

Everything a teacher builds during a trial or a subscription is hers to keep. Cancelling stops new kids decks being generated; nothing already made is deleted.

• A printable worksheet from the deck — the take-home page with the letter to trace and the picture to circle. The deck already holds everything it needs; the button is not built yet.
• Bilingual narration. The voice is English today. Hindi and Punjabi alongside it is planned, but browser voices for Punjabi are patchy on school laptops and it will not be promised until it is measured.
• Building a whole series at once — “the alphabet, A to Z” as 26 decks overnight.
• A fully offline download that also carries the photographs and the typeface. Today a downloaded deck keeps its structure, games and voice with no internet; the photos and the hand-lettered font need a connection.

• Ten finished lessons you can play in the browser right now — they read themselves aloud: prolaud.com/help/kids-decks
• The twelve looks, each one playable: prolaud.com/help/deck-looks
• Every live-class control, documented with screenshots from a real class: prolaud.com/help/live-slides
• The feature page, with the full picture: prolaud.com/features/live-lessons
• The join page a child uses: prolaud.com/join