Mo, I wasn't promoting banning that song. As the facilitator of two after-school/summer game song groups for African American children ages 5-12 years, my purposes in introducing children to traditional or adapted versions of African American game songs was

1.to teach something about the history and culture of African Americans
2. to reinforce cognitive skills such as listening, word building, and following instructions and social skills such as teamwork, and consideration for others (winning and losing gracefully).

Those groups also featured contemporary children's rhymes/cheers-which provided great opportunities for me to collect examples of rhymes/cheers that I didn't know. But that's another story...


In the context of these groups, I didn't feel at all remiss in changing the title/word to "Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar" to "Who Took A Cookie From The Cookie Jar" because

1.in that song the word "stole" means "took without parmission", therefore changing the word to "took" was a minor adaptation

2. in my opinion, the action of the song sets up the dynamics (teaches children) to be dishonest about his or her actions when they are (almost) caught doing something wrong. And I didn't (don't)want to promote dishonestly.

It's also possible that I felt justified in changing "Who Stole The Cookie From The Cookie Jar" to "Who Took A Cokkie From The Cookie Jar" because I recalled reading that wording in some book. However, I don't recall whether I knew about that version of the song at that time.

Furthermore, I think it's important to note that these game song groups were my concept. And integral to that concept was that I would introduce the lyrics and performance activities of traditional African American game songs to the children, staff and any other persons in attendance (such as the children's parents/guardians) to see if those songs "worked". By "worked", I mean to assess whether the words made some sense to the children and whether the performance activities were something children could easily learn and enjoyed doing. Besides adding to the children's repertoire of game songs, the ultimate goal was to perform these game songs at community programs.

Part of this group process was to get children's reactions to those songs, and to ask for their input about how the words and performance activity of a traditional song might be adapted if they didn't "work". For example, I introduced children to the 19th century or earlier African American circle game song "Green Sally Up" which includes the words:

Green Sally up
Green Sally down
Last one here
Gotta squat the ground.

-snip-

The children didn't know what "squat" [on] the ground meant. And there were other lines in that song that made no sense to these children. I explained what "squat" and those other lines meant, and even tried changing the word to "squat" to "touch". But the song just wasn't working until one of the project staff (who happened also to be a parent of two of the children) suggested that we focus on colors. That comment inspired me to compose the song "Green Color Up", which admittedly is a whole different song. The beginning words of that song were changed to:

Green color up
Green color down
Green color all around the town.

For more information about this song, visit this page of my website, http://www.cocojams.com/games_children_play.htm

All of this to say that I don't at all regret changing the word to that "Who Stole The Cookie From The Cookie Jar" song-a song that the children in those groups didn't know previously, showed little enjoyment in playing, and didn't fit the "public performance" nature of those groups anyway.

**

By the way, I searched my files and found a published version of "Who Stole The Cookie From The Cookie Jar" that includes the word "took" and not "stole". I'll share that version in my next post to this thread.