Through its family, interests, school and the whole world around it every child participate in social and cultural practices where a whole range of literacies take place. Children have both shared and differing experiences of written language; every child has its unique patterns and unique lingual resources. This together with changed reading habits, higher demands and declining results, according to national and international surveys, generates new questions for literacy education. This paper will present results from an ongoing ethnographical study which focuses nine-year-old children’s use of written language, in and outside a multilingual and multicultural school in Sweden. The study takes a hermeneutic and postcolonial point of departure together with theories from literacy research. In this text the complexity of literacy from different children’s perspectives will be explored in line with the above theoretical stand points.