As an aspect of the confluence between schooling and lived experiences, children develop literate identities and build personal theories of literacy. The purpose of this study was to explore the construction or children's literate identity in different contexts. Four children, two from Canada and two from the United States, were interviewed and observed in their 4th-grade classrooms. Their teachers and a parent of each child were also interviewed, and the classroom literacy instruction observed. Stories of the children's literate identities told by the child, the parent and the teacher were constructed and compared. The children who engaged in the activities presented were those whose literate identities matched schooled literacy. The other children saw the activities as tasks, not as opportunities to learn.