"Using Graphic Organizers
Graphic organizers are excellent tools for helping students connect ideas and see relationships between different pieces of information. The goal is for students to expand their knowledge by understanding the material in their own way. Graphic organizers can be used for a variety of purposes, such as eliciting prior knowledge, demonstrating a sequence of events, and comparing and contrasting. "
This site has tons of PDFs to download and use in your instructional setting. Graphic organizers and exemplars/mentor texts are just a few resources on offer.
"Poem Generator
This makes random poems. First, it randomly selects sentence patterns. Then, wherever the pattern has a number, it randomly selects a word from one of the numbered word lists. You can either choose one of the sample sets of words and sentence patterns, or you can enter your own words and sentence patterns."
Using term "critical" in relation to critical essay does not imply that you will have to attack a certain work. One can create a critical essay that wholeheartedly agrees with assigned literature. The word "critical" describes your attitude when you examine the reviewed work. Such mind-set may be termed as "uninvolved analysis," which implies that you consider the coherence of the literature, the completeness of its desribed events, and so forth, before you accept or refuse it.