Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the ways contemporary childhoods are being shaped by a range of multimodal communicative practices (Kress, "Literacy in the new media age," Routledge, New York, 2003; Lankshear and Knobel, "New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning," Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 2003). This is particularly relevant as the changing communication systems of the 21st century are influencing the ways children make meaning in their worlds. In this article, we discuss two case studies that occurred in two different urban Canadian contexts where we sought to privilege the voices, lives, and meaning making experiences of two young boys by involving them as active participants in research. Drawing on sociocultural and multimodal theories of learning, the purpose of this research was to investigate the complexity of the everyday communicative practices utilized by young Canadian children in and out-of-school, in an attempt to inform the future direction of literacy curricula for children. Although many researchers advocate for children's "voices" to be taken into account in educational research, few report the evidence of engaging children in the research process. In the two cases, the data collection methods provided opportunities for children to express themselves, and revealed the meaning making practices that they valued. The findings also showed how the practices valued and promoted in the focal children's classrooms generally reflected traditional and narrow modes of communication, specifically, print-based and teacher-directed practices.