This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study on the uses and effects of fairy tale engagements in Canadian preadolescent children of Greek second-generation heritage. The aim of the study was to understand more about children's uses of traditional Greek fairy tale narratives and to examine the relations between cultural forms and development in young readers. More specifically, this inquiry attempts to understand children's potent deployment of popular culture in times of learning. The participants of the study were 22 preadolescents who interacted with the context of various traditional Greek fairy tales. The study provides evidence of the children's animated experiences of meaning making processes as they wrote, argued, made art and confessed their personal ideas and feelings. Through these children's engagements with the fairy tales, we examine how the formal elements of texts meet the social positions of users to reproduce or permit a questioning of existing social relations in the making of child identities.This study sheds light on the transformative interaction between the text and the reader. Stories constitute the basis in which we structure and communicate social experience. Through the conceptual framework of Cultural Studies and Feminist Theories, child readers of specific cultural formation are shown to negotiate the dilemmas and worries of gender, ethnicity and age identity through reading experience. The students use Greek fairy tales to make meanings of and for themselves. Their passionate engagements with the oral tales help them to articulate selfhood in three ways. They read as ethnic subjects, as preadolescent social subjects and as gendered subjects in formation. Research findings show both compliance to and refusal of dominant stereotypes, as art achieves force in the landscape of mental experience through identification, reflection and dialogue. Additionally, the findings challenge theories of reading and representation that assume passive, behaviorally manipulated readers who automatically decode what appears to be encoded dominant messages of popular texts. The study supports the general notion of classical tales as worthy objects of inclusion in elementary language arts curricula, especially given the opportunities they present for assisting readers in working through age and gender related issues. The discussion shows how children's engagements with popular classical tales can provide raw material for fresh cultural production and making insight through schooling. This study telegraphs how important it is for teachers to teach children directly about alternative genres and literary conventions. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates in heartfelt ways the lively possibilities of popular culture and ethnic consciousness in contemporary Canadian life.