Whew! Almost all of the local TV personalities you know and love have been very busy winding up the month of February and the start of March with the annual Nevada Reading Week. The Clark County School District encourages the more than 200,000 students from elementary to high school to take time during this week to read more—and have fun, too! This year's theme, Wild About Reading, kept us jumping from February 27th to March 4th.

Most of the District's nearly 200 elementary schools send invitations to local media and other prominent folks asking if they'll take time out of their busy day to stop by and read to the kids. It's a lot of fun, and while most TV people are happy to help out, visiting a classroom or two is about all they have time for. On the other hand there are a few of us who get real serious about Nevada Reading Week and cram as many schools into our schedules as we can handle. I "only" managed to squeeze 12 different schools into my new work schedule this year—and I still feel badly that I left out some of the teachers who were kind enough to call, write or email me invitations.

Sometimes I worry, too, that maybe I need to move on to other material, but I really haven't yet. I'm still always excited to read the same incredible book to any grade level year after year after year: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, by Judi Barrett with awesome illustrations by Ron Barrett, who I assume must somehow be related to Judi, but I've never been able to figure out exactly how. If you've never heard of the book, chances are your school-aged children or grandchildren have. While the local libraries no doubt have copies, you can find it online at BarnesandNoble.com or Amazon and it'd be a welcome gift to just about any youngster.

Even when reading to 5th graders—who you'd think might be beyond such "younger" material—it's almost like a trip back in time. One 5th grader this year said to me, "Hey, you read that same book to us when I was in 3rd grade." Without spoiling anything, I can happily tell you that the story is about an imaginary town called Chewandswallow where there are no grocery stores, but only because they don't need 'em: the sky supplies all the food they could possibly want. The weather there arrives conveniently at three different times during the day: breakfast lunch and dinner, with meal-appropriate food dropping from the sky. Trouble brews when Mother Nature starts losing control of the size and the amount of food. The imagery of the words and pictures of what happens to the town and how they deal with it never seems to grow old, even after repeated readings. Every time I show up in a classroom with my slightly dog-eared copy of the book several students get pretty excited. Their eyes get big, their eyebrows raise up and they wave an arm or two saying, "Ooh. Ooh. That's my favorite book!"

I always tell the kids how important reading is to all of us and that there's an important reason for guest readers to visit them. It's so they'll understand that the idea of needing to be a good reader isn't just some crazy plot by their parents and teachers to cram a silly idea into their heads while the rest of the grown-ups laugh. It's not just that reading will help 'em become whatever it is they want to become when they grow up ("Heck," I tell them, "even a multi-million dollar basketball player needs to be able to read that big ol' contract."), reading can be just plain fun. And if you keep reading the same good book over and over again, that's great. In fact it's probably better than watching the same darn Disney DVD over and over and over again. No offense to Disney, of course.