Elementary students are tend to depend heavily on visual informations in the cognitive process. Thus, elementary science textbooks provide science contents mostly by inscriptions, the visual materials, with little verbal information in the limited page area. Especially, since the textbooks include many accompanying inscriptions rather than a basic inscription, it is very important to understand the relationships among many inscriptions in teaching and leaning science. Therefore, this study analyzed the status and characteristics of accompanying inscriptions used. in elementary science textbooks, and classified them according to their functions. As results, we found six types of the accompanying inscriptions such as inner part, detail, result, process, emphasis, and explanation. Accompanying inscriptions were used more frequently in the lower grade (3rd and 4th grades) than the higher grade (5th and 6th grades). We discussed the examples of each type in detail, and thus revealed some possible difficulties in understanding inscriptions caused by the inconsistency of the directions of the basic inscription and accompanying inscription, and by the absence of the sign linking the basic and accompanying inscriptions.