The Florida DOE B.E.S.T. ELA Standards offers two lists of suggested texts. One is a grade level set aligned to teaching the standards. The other is a "civics" oriented list, organized in bands (K-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-8, and 9-12). 

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FCTE supports the goal of the new B.E.S.T. ELA Standards for increasing the rigor of the texts used to prepare students for their post-secondary lives and believes that ELA teachers must maintain a careful balance between using literature and informative texts as instructional materials/content and using all forms of text as a means of encouraging students to be lifelong readers and lifelong learners.

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Any text may be a mirror of the life a student is currently living, and our students need to be able to see themselves in the stories they read. However, texts may also be windows into worlds the students have never encountered but need to see. FCTE is offering these ideas for companion texts to help Florida's ELA teachers find texts to use in their classrooms to best meet the needs of their students while also fulfilling the goals of the new B.E.S.T. Standards.

The high school texts below have been organized into thematic sets but are easily mixed and matched with each other to form other thematic collections. They were derived from a list obtained during work on the DOE Standards Revision Committee in spring 2020 and may need to be updated. The middle school lists are from the most recent version of the B.E.S.T. standards available online. FCTE has been working all summer to generate these lists. Obviously, there are many other titles that would work -- and we'll be soliciting ideas from our membership.

FCTE reminds teachers to read any book in its entirety before choosing it for whole class instruction. Student choice is a key component in developing a lifelong love of reading. It is key that students have the right to stop reading a choice book they find to be offensive or unsuitable. Not all books are appropriate for all students.