Today's teachers need up-to-the-minute information to help their students make sense of the multimodal texts they encounter daily in and out of school. "Reading the Visual" is an essential introduction that focuses on what teachers should "know" about multimodal literacy and how to "teach" it. This engaging book provides theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical frameworks for teaching a wide-range of visual and multimodal texts, including historical fiction, picture books, advertisements, websites, comics, graphic novels, news reports, and film. Each unit of study presented contains suggestions for selecting cornerstone texts and visual images and launching the unit, as well as lesson plans, text sets, and analysis guides. These units are designed to be readily adapted to fit the needs of a variety of settings and grade levels. Book features include: (1) an accessible introduction to visual literacy and multimodality; (2) classroom strategies and demonstrations for analyzing and interpreting multimodal texts; (3) hands-on examples of units of study for ten types of multimodal texts; and (4) resources for developing and adapting units, including suggested texts, analysis guides, and learning objectives. [Foreword written by James Paul Gee.]