One of the purposes of the classroom-based research featured in this article was to explore how the ongoing development of young children's understanding of elements of visual art and design would affect their comprehension, interpretation and analysis of the artwork in a selection of picturebooks. Social semiotics, multimodality, sociocultural theory and transactional theory framed the study, as well as the analysis and discussion of the data featured in this article. Further, the reading of and writing about the picturebooks were situated in the four roles/practices required for reading multimodal and visual texts. During a nine-week period, 22 seven- and eight-year-old students participated in several activities that focused on learning about specific elements of visual art and design. The students read, talked about and responded in writing to a selection of picturebooks. This article features an analysis of the students' responses to two picturebooks and discusses what the students' text-based writing reveals about their understanding and appreciation of the artwork in these multimodal texts. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of teaching elements of visual art and design in order to develop students' visual literacy skills and repertoires of capability with respect to reading multimodal texts.