For several years children at Joyce Public School have been rewriting traditional stories from localized cultural and linguistic perspectives, creating innovative, individualized narrative forms with digital technology. Our experimental multiliteracies research project is a collaboration of school and university teachers and researchers following a guided action research paradigm. The study has as one of its stated objectives the development of multilingual story retelling as a means of inexpensively supporting home language maintenance, fostering language awareness and aiding English as a second language learning in a community of high linguistic diversity. This paper tells our story thus far, focusing on how we have approached the creation of multilingual stories in heterogeneous, urban language classes, discussing stumbling blocks that have forced creative problem-solving and showcasing successes.