Literacy educators need to develop children's repertoire of reading strategies beyond the decoding of written language to address the visual images and graphic design features found in contemporary picturebooks if they are to become successful readers. The qualitative case study reported here was designed to investigate the instructional approaches used to support the development of intermediate grade students' interpretive strategies for comprehending the visual and design features of multimodal texts. By focusing on the classroom teacher's instructional moves and students' responses, this study asserts there were several paths to interpretation that supported students' comprehension of these texts.Multimodal texts or ensembles, in particular contemporary and postmodern picturebooks, present challenges to readers as they work across the multiple meaning systems inherent in these texts to construct meaning (Jewitt, 2006;Serafini, 2014). As Siegel (2006) notes, "language arts education can no longer ignore the way that our social, cultural, and economic worlds now require facility with texts and practices involving the full range of representational modes" (p. 65). Research on how to support students' development of a range of interpretive strategies to approach and interpret the visual images and graphic design elements in multimodal ensembles is essential as the texts students encounter grow more complex.This paper focuses on a research study designed to investigate how a particular classroom teacher supported the development of students' interpretive strategies for responding to the multimodal aspects of selected contemporary and postmodern picturebooks (Sipe & Pantaleo, 2008), in particular the work of award winning children's author-illustrator Anthony Browne. Postmodern picturebooks often contain non-linear plots, polyphonic narrators, intertextual references, a blending of genres, and indeterminacies (McCallum, 1996). Goldstone (2004) suggests postmodern picturebooks be viewed as a new genre, one that contains a sense of irony, contradictions in the relationship between text and image, and the uncovering of the artistic process of book making. These features of postmodern picturebooks requires the reader to approach these texts in new ways, paying close attention to the ways that authors and illustrators play with the traditional picturebook elements, format, and design.