The Gotzee!™ Story

“Oh my! Did you read the last one? I couldn’t put it down until the end! I was totally sucked in, flipping one page after another.” 

These teachers are not talking about the latest read from Oprah’s Book Club. They are talking about the latest mind bender, game or logic puzzle from Gotzee!™ Choosing to spend precious free time problem solving. Trying one strategy after another, brainstorming with friends and family, laughing, sighing and jotting ideas in their notebook, they are escaping a bag of school work for just a minute longer. Over the weekend, these teachers find joy, escape and community in Math!

During Covid, our family discovered SET™!

SET™ is a game where you are tasked to make card triads with like and unlike attributes. A game I first played at a happy hour with our math team in a real bar with other people looking. So brave. In grade school, our youngest would bring home the challenge problem from school and we would pour over possible solutions and wait for Monday’s answer key with pure anticipation. During travel, we would entertain ourselves with estimates of how long until the next subway arrives. New Yorkers know…that can be just too long! Our son, a musician, passionately explains tempos and bars, unbeknownst to him, he is speaking in fractional terms. With two self-proclaimed number people as parents, our kiddos would just as likely sit around and share a logic puzzle or mind bender as we would espouse the best part from our current read.

Teaching during the Pandemic highlighted the importance of the Math Party!

As a lower school math coordinator in Spring of 2020, I had the opportunity to re-learn how to teach math over the miles and across Zoom. Teaching curious minds as young as five and as old as eight over the interwebs. We all became first year teachers again! “It’s not what you teach, it’s the connections and engagement you derive that matters,” is the opening inspirational message during our school’s K12 August gathering. The Spring of 2020 is when we lived the truth of these words. Showing up every day for our kids, providing an escape from the global uncertainty and an invitation to engage in math was my tiny community contribution. I invited students’ to join the math party everyday and they laughed, smiled, worked hard and learned multiplication, word problems and even fractions! I still am not sure how this was possible. What I can say is that I insisted on only teaching with interaction from students. I didn’t know how else to teach nor was I brave enough to record my lesson monologues. I taught synchronous lessons from day one. We played games, we explored and we learned together. Looking in the rearview mirror, I gotta say that was one cool Math party! 

In the Spring of 2020, I became a certified Illustrative Mathematics™  Facilitator and entered an amazing community of learners.

At the same time that I was learning to virtually teach young students, I was working with teachers nationwide to facilitate their school’s curriculum shift to Illustrative Mathematics™. Since March 2020, teachers have been doing the unthinkable…hybrid learning, remote instruction, teaching with both hands behind their back and some where even learning a new math curriculum. Oh, this party was anything but fun…I won’t lie. It was painful, for each and every one of us. Yet, by the end of the school year, something had shifted. “The kids are talking”, “even my reluctant math kid is participating,” “every student has something to contribute,” and “I can’t believe how far they have come!” are just a few of the celebrations now heard at these professional learning events, aka Math Parties! 

As I worked with IM™ teachers, I continual heard their pain points around centers. 

Elementary teachers embrace the IM™ curriculum, and when they have the time to seek out, print, prepare and interpret the embedded math centers, they LOVE it. The curriculum writers at IM™ embed centers into the lesson framework to address and support standards aligned problem-based learning. Once unpacked and accessible, the centers provide rich learning opportunities and invite ALL students to the math party. 

Yet, many excellent teachers are not using centers. Why? The challenge is access!

Challenge #1: Treasure hunt. Digging through the curriculum platform to find the blackline masters, instructions and materials is a time consuming venture. 

Challenge #2: Layers of prep. Reading and interpreting the instructions. Gathering manipulatives, building spinners, cutting, collating and preparing card decks. 

Challenge #3: Student access. Provide engaging and accessible student facing materials. Ensure that student facing materials are in a format that is accessible to all learners, including emergent readers.

Gotzee!™ was born from this journey. From a desire to; engage ALL students and classrooms in a math party; elevate the joy of the math classroom; and provide multiple opportunities for authentic math practice.

Gotzee!™ math specialists, reading specialists and graphic designer set out to tackle all three challenges. The result is a low prep, ready to roll math centers that align with integrity to the same great IM™ centers included on the curriculum platform. From my time as an IM Certified Facilitator, I heard what teachers needed to make centers work in their classroom and this call has been poured into creating Gotzee!™.

Gotzee!™ supports all standards based math curriculums. In and out of the general classroom, Gotzee!™ engages students in joyful and effective math practice. 

Gotzee!™ is derived from the invitational, standards-aligned math centers of Illustrative Mathematics K-5™. Gotzee!™ aligns with any math curriculum and is specifically mapped to CCSS and IM™ grade level units of study. Gotzee!™ is a powerful intervention support tool and a resource to engage learners in summer, and in before and after school programs. It can also be used for your at home math party, like my mother-in-law, Mary, who is playing these games with her grandson, Charlie. 

Gotzee!™ is on a mission to bring joyful and effective math practice to ALL by providing low prep, standards-aligned, and accessible materials. 

At Gotzee!™ we embrace IM’s vision of a “world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics” and go one step further to envision a world where everyone is invited to and joins in the Math Party. Even my sister.