bigtime blogging challenge 15 begins!

Hello everyone! Today's the day! The BigTime Blogging Challenge officially begins, so I hope you're ready for a month long celebration of writing and teaching and collaborating with other teacher writers around the blogosphere!

First, just some housekeeping:

1. Write as often as you like, but be sure to link your posts to mine here at BigTime Literacy.
2. Use the image above in your post and then link back to BigTime Literacy.
3. Make sure to comment on at least three other people's blogs to keep the encouragement going!
4. You can write according to my prompts or not - the whole idea is to just write every day!
5. Use #btbc15 when you post on Social Media so all our writing can be collected together
6. Have fun and make new friends!

And let's get to business now! Today's prompt:

Introduce yourself and talk about what you're hoping for this challenge.

Well, as you all know, I'm Michelle. I am a Literacy Coach - my third year coming up. Prior to that, I taught middle school ELA for 10 years. (Man, I'm getting old wise!)

I seriously love to write. One day I'd really like to write a book, so I've just been using this blog for the past two years to write about what's going on in my world - mostly teaching stuff but also some personal life stuff, too. It's my hope that over time patterns will emerge and I'll have more direction for my book. In the mean time, I'm really enjoying getting to know other bloggers. I've become friends with quite a few of them - met a few for lunch IRL and others have been added to my personal facebook page. I love connecting with and learning from other educators!

This blogging challenge began in 2014. I had signed up to give a PD in my district about blogging, and I planned the challenge for the month after the PD. The reason for that was twofold: First, I know that new bloggers need to write consistently to get into the habit of it, and when you do a challenge together there is more support and encouragement, which keeps us going. Second, BigTime Literacy was celebrating it's first birthday and I wanted to do something great to celebrate it - so the blogging challenge was born!

This year, I'm hoping to make some new friends, share some new stories, and just enjoy my summer free time with writing and reading. I hope many of you will join!

So tell me, who are you and what are you hoping and/or expecting from this month-long writing challenge? Can't wait to see who's here!

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