Around the World in 5 Kids’ Games

On every schoolyard across the world you will find games invented by children. Hand-clapping routines, rhyming stanzas and intricate rules for tiny competitions; games born of the creativity, insight and idiosyncrasy of children’s minds.

In New York City’s diverse playgrounds, kids play games in Haitian Creole, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish, just to name a few.

Girls playing a game from Yemen at a middle school in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Students at P.S. 34, a Polish-language school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

A group from the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Unlike nursery rhymes, lullabies, or children’s songs these games are conceived of, built upon and passed along by kids, largely by girls. Irene Chagall, who researched the history and spread of hand-clapping games for her documentary “Let’s Get the Rhythm: The Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack,” describes these games as “playground lore,” a rich body of folk literature that is just outside the attention of most adults. Some will be familiar to most people in the United States — like the story of Miss Mary Mack and her silver buttons or Miss Suzie and her steamboat — and some are specific to a single community or neighborhood.

In New York City, home to people and languages from all over the globe, the Endangered Language Alliance recently mapped 637 languages and dialects to the New York Metropolitan Area. Within the diversity of playground pastimes, each game reflects the history and unique identity of the community it comes from, while at the same time highlighting the shared imagination of New York’s schoolchildren.

Darnell Benoit, 49, founded the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project to help serve and bring together New York’s Haitian immigrant population. “We have students that have been here for five years and students that just arrived yesterday,” she said. “The thing that unifies us is being here as an immigrant, not speaking English, and feeling isolated.”

One popular game among the students at Flanbwayan is Pepsi Cola, a four-person clapping game that ends in a litany of insults and deflections: You never put socks on! You poop a lot!

Stacy Jean-Louis, 15, studying at Flanbwayan.

On the way to a nearby park in Flatbush.

Playing another game, Lalin ak Solèy (Sun and Moon) at Winthrop Playground.

Buried among the childish jabs, one line makes reference to the AIDS epidemic, a topic with deep cultural significance to Haiti and Haitian-Americans. Benoit recalls the aftermath of a divisive F.D.A. recommendation to exclude Haitians from donating blood in the United States. “It was a nightmare for us, there was so much stigma against Haitians in the city.” She added, “You were afraid to say you were from Haiti, kids were beat up in school, it was a nightmare.”

Kyra Gaunt, an ethnomusicologist who writes extensively on hand-clapping games in her book “The Games Black Girls Play,” said that these games often find kids incorporating the topics and conversations they overhear in their community. “When their parents share the latest news, or talk about how they are being treated, kids are overhearing that discourse,” Gaunt explained. “One way to alleviate the anxiety from these topics is to make games about them.”

In Lalin ak Solèy, one player is a djab or “devil” who is trying to find out who disturbed their fire. The other players have to avoid the djab’s revenge.

“It’s not the devil that we think of in America,” Benoit said. “It’s more like a zombie or a demon, people who are living but not living. Our stories and myths are full of these kinds of demons that scare kids, usually to make them do things they don’t want to do.”

That an irreverent, semi-sensical children’s game would touch on deeply meaningful and tragic topics is actually quite common, Gaunt said.

“In these games, girls are learning black culture, they’re learning the codes, the way you joke about things, the way you hide the things that are really painful,” she said. “Boys are socialized to suppress emotions and suppress processing emotions through verbal means, through anything but aggression. Girls don’t have that as an option. We’re not allowed to be angry. And because we are relegated to a kind of silence, embodied communication and non-verbal communication becomes a primary outlet.”

According to Seulgi Park, 10, SeSeSe is about a “a bunny who is sailing across the sky on a boat, but there is nothing there on the boat.” The white canoe in the lyrics likely refers to the crescent moon — several East Asian legends and traditional tales feature a bunny and a Cassia tree on the moon making rice cakes, pounding an elixir of immortality, or just keeping the Moon Goddess company.

Playing a round of Kai, Bai, Bo (Rock, Paper, Scissors) at P.S. 32 in Murray Hill, Queens.

Goals for the fifth-grade class are written in English and Korean.

Keumju Shin, 62, remembers playing SeSeSe when she was a child in Seoul, over 50 years ago. She is also one of the people who helped to found the Korean dual language program at P.S. 32 in Murray Hill, Queens, home to a bustling Korean community.

“Now we have a lot of second-generation mommies sending their students here, where years ago it was more first-generation parents,” Shin said. Lessons in Korean can be daunting for students who are not used to speaking the language at home, so Shin tries to ease students in everyday: “We start the day in English, and then it’s all Korean after lunch.”

Sunna Kim, 10, takes a cooling break.

In a game for more players, Uri Jibe Wae Wanni (Why Did You Come To My House), two teams take turns trying to steal players (flowers) from each other’s teams (houses) by winning rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

It’s not unusual for students in the program to outpace their parents. “One of my parents recently said their child found out their Korean was very bad,” Shin said. “They were helping with homework and the child said, ‘Ma, you don’t know Korean!’ That’s happening a lot recently.”

Mariquita seems to be a mash-up of two games that were heard as early as the 1940s in the Dominican Republic: Isabellita, about a woman who steals away someone’s husband, and A Las Una, about a woman who has a child who dies.

Students in the hall at I.S. 145 in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Ashly Tejeda, 11, and Larismar Canela, 12, play a different game called Pepsi Cola.

On the handball court outside I.S. 145.

A “mariquita” is a dressable paper doll popular in the Caribbean country. The phrase is also used as a derogatory slur. But according to Lissette Acosta Corniel, who teaches Dominican history at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, the name of the game could also be wordplay. “If you separate the words — mari and quita — and invert them, you get quita mari, like quita marido, which translates to ‘steal husband,’ or ‘husband-stealer,’ which is what the song is about.” According to the students (at least what they were willing to tell an adult reporter) it just means “ladybug.”

Ashly Tejeda, 11, played the game in the Dominican Republic. When she came to New York City six months ago, she enrolled in I.S. 145’s dual-language program and met other girls from the Dominican Republic who knew the same games.

Doa’a Nasser, 13, learned Sa Sa Sa back in Yemen, before she came to the United States when she was 9. “I learned it from my parents, they used to play it when they were young,” she said.

“The lyrics are silly but funny because, like, everyone is afraid of another person, and it’s kind of random.” The game ends with a “not hard” punch in the stomach from whoever is fastest. “You get excited when you play it, like nervous,” Doa’a said.

Doa’a Nasser and her classmates play a game in which whoever is “it” has a certain number of tries to stomp another player’s foot to get them out.

If they run out of stomps, they wink at another player to make them “it.”

Doa’a Nasser, 13, and Khloud Ghanem, 14, check to see whose arm is longer.

Like many songs in the canon of children’s folk games, Sa Sa Sa touches on some darker topics. “When it got to the beating and the punishment, I was shocked,” said Debbie Almontaser, a prominent voice on Yemeni issues in America and author of “Leading While Muslim.” “It plays right into the stereotypes we would want to dispel.”

Since the start of the war in Yemen, Almontaser says that more and more refugee families have arrived in New York City in search of safe harbor. As a result, schools like Urban Assembly School for Criminal Justice have seen a growing number of Yemeni children enrolling (though Urban Assembly doesn’t offer a dual-language program in Arabic).

Sarah Alsilwi, 20, who grew up in Yemeni and Yemeni-American communities in New York, chalked up the tone of the song to a kind of gallows humor and a difference between recent Yemeni immigrants and Yemenis like herself who were born here in the United States. “Sometimes the humor back home is a little different,” said Alsilwi, meaning Yemen. “Kids grow up a little faster, because of the circumstances and what’s happening there. Since they have seen so much already, a simple song like this, it’s not that serious, you know?”

As for the girls themselves, Doa’a thought the lesson of the game was more in line with the Golden Rule, saying, “If you hurt someone, the same could happen to you.”

Located in the historically Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint, P.S. 34 is home to one of the city’s two public Polish dual language programs. These days more and more of the kids studying Polish are second or third generation, whose parents hope they will stay connected to the language, tradition, and culture of Poland.

Kids at the school play games that are popular with kids all over the city (“Tic tac toe, Johnny got hit by a U.F.O.”; “Quack a dilly oso, quack quack qua-ack, señorita your mama smells like pizza”; etc). But, they can play many of them in both English and Polish.

Pikachu is played in many neighborhoods in English, but in the Polish version, the sound “pika” takes on a double meaning. In addition to the sound a Pikachu makes, “pikać” is a colloquial verb in Polish used to describe a fast, rhythmic beeping like a cell phone, a smoke detector when it’s low on battery or someone’s heart.

Fourth-graders Otylia Skoczek, Victoria Chrzanowski and Julia Tylutki in the playground at P.S. 34.

Pi-ka…chu?

Julia defeats Nicola Szaczkowski to be the “winner winner chicken dinner” of Koncentracja 64.

The students particularly like Concentration 64 (Koncentracja 64), a contest to see who can name, on rhythm and without hesitating, the most items in a given category. During a round focused on food, the girls mixed more common favorites like apples (jabłka) and strawberries (truskawki) with Polish specialties like pierogi and mielone (pan-fried meatballs).

The girls have also dabbled in creating their own games, though they are pretty esoteric. “I made a game called Jestem Polska (I am Polish),” recalled 9-year-old Julia Tylutki, “but nobody knows it.”

Her friend Otylia Skoczek, also 9, has gained a little more traction with her game Queen of Hearts. Players take turns naming colors in a certain order, trying to find out what color the Queen’s lost diamond was. Though the exact rules were a little unclear to this reporter, the game ends with the winner giving a karate chop to the loser’s neck while yelling “Off with your head!”