In this article, the authors discuss mixed-media projects done with elementary students in a summer art camp and preservice elementary teachers taking Visual Arts in the Elementary Classroom, illustrating their consideration of how stories carry the curricular potential to bring students' out-of-school experiences into the classroom. In order to pull stories and narrative into their classrooms, they worked with the concept of multimodal literacy, or the practice of moving from one sign system to another (e.g., transmediation from verbal-visual, visual-verbal, visual- spatial) (Albers & Harste, 2007). The projects presented are the result of their encounters with multimodal literacy (Albers & Harste, 2007; Berghoff, 1998), the work of Olivia Gude (2004, 2007, 2013), and the work of Beth Olshansky (2008), who urges general educators to allow students to draw first and write second, arguing that the aesthetic experience of drawing will yield more complex writings from students. Their parallel exposure to these works led Martinez and Nolte-Yupari to (re)consider ways in which they ask their students to move from one sign system to another and how they can use their familiarity with one system to comfortably transition and develop their skills with another system. This presentation of their projects is based on their reflections and observations of how they saw students demonstrate their understanding and meaning making by successfully moving between sign systems.