Thanks, Sunday Monkey!

I remember playing "Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar" long long ago when I was growing up {Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1950s}.
It was the only handclapping game that I remember playing with kids sitting down and clapping there own hands to the rhythm while they chanted the words.

The way we played it was that numbers were called out consecutively starting with #1 and going through how many numbers of children were in the group. Boring.

Far more adults who I talked to have recollections of playing "Who stole a cookie" than children. "Who stole [took] the cookie" doesn't appear to be well known among children {mostly African American}in Pittsburgh who I worked with in after school programming from 1997-to date. It doesn't appear to be a game that children play without adult prompting and adult supervision like other group hand claps such as "Concentration" and "Slap Billyola" {"Strolla Ola Ola"}. *

If this game was known to the children who I worked with before I introduced it, it was usually played with the person who starts randomly selecting a number.

For instance, the first person would call out "#5 stole the cookie from the cookie jar". The response that I remember using and that I've heard in Pittsburgh is less polite than Sunday's Monkey's memory. It is:

"#5" : "Who me? Couldn't be.
Rest of the group: Then who stole the cookie from the cookie jar

and then #5 would call out another random number

BTW, when I introduced it to children I changed the words to "Who took the cookie from the cookie jar" since I figured this is what was meant anyway and I didn't like promoting 'stealing'

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* More on those rhymes in posts that follow...



Azizi