Language Arts Stack

[Marielle Lange]

Hi Mark,

> One solution is to create sentences that deal with subjects that  
> the students are studying in school: science, art, music, history,  
> government, etc.  This is still pretty time consuming, but it is  
> better than Zippy the Zebra  : )

The BNC (British National Corpus, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/)  
contains about 40 texts which were classified as having been written  
for a child audience. It may be paying, but you should then have an  
agreement for copyright clearance. (I don't know what the rules are  
when borrowing two sentences from a text).

You may also find something useful at:
http://bowland-files.lancs.ac.uk/lever/index.htm (Lancaster Corpus of  
Children's Project Writing). You probably cannot use the sentences as  
such, but you can probably adapt them.

Other sites with resources about kids' language
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/   Child Language Data Exchange System
(though they are mostly transcripts of oral conversation).
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/cpwd/ (children's printed word  
database)
http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=1076&1076_0=3521  
(children early reading vocabulary).
http://www.tasaliteracy.com/wfg/wfg-main.html (the educator's word  
frequency guide).
http://registry.dfki.de/ (natural language software registery).

They don't really have the resources you are after, but you may find  
exactly what you need by mailing the managers of these resources.

Marielle