MERIDIAN - On most days, Dave Schubert is a naturalist and camp director at Beaver Lake Nature Center, but not during a visit to Cato-Meridian Elementary School last week.

Instead, Schubert was incognito as Professor Arthur Pod, who wore a beige jungle jacket covered in plastic spiders with dung beetles, butterflies and praying mantises overflowing from the front pockets as he stood before an auditorium crammed with young schoolchildren to talk to them about insects and arachnids.

“How many legs does a spider have?” Pod asked his audience last Tuesday as he held an enlarged cardboard model of a spider in his hand.

“Eight!” they shouted back.

“Let's count them together,” Pod responded. Students counted the legs, with voices booming louder and louder with each number called.

“Spiders won't jump and go after you like in the movies,” Pod said. “But if you are walking through a field you may have one crawling on you. But don't worry, spiders just want to get away.”

Throughout the hour-long presentation, Pod talked about exoskeletons, the differences between ants and insects, and how they are important to pollinating the fruits and vegetables humans eat.

“This is a scary thought, but if we didn't have insects, we wouldn't have fruits and veggies,” he said. “We'd only be eating rice. Insects do a good job.”

He spoke of butterflies, honey bees, walking sticks, moths, stag beetles, praying mantises and more.

Last Tuesday's excursion into entomology was the inaugural event of a month-long celebration of reading sponsored by the Cato-Meridian Central School District branch of the New York State Parent Teacher Association's Parents as Reading Partners group, which is a collaborative effort among parents, staff, and community to build a reading partnership between the home and the school.

“The whole goal is to promote reading and families involved,” Yvonne Case, a school literacy kindergarten specialist who sits on the PARP committee, said.

“Research shows that if parents read to their children, they tend to do much better in reading skills and vocabulary and promote a love of reading. We are just constantly trying to promote that in the home.”

The committee chooses a different theme every year to get students involved in the month-long promotion. This year's theme is “Don't Bug Me, I'm Reading,” and students will participate in numerous events and read bug-themed books, among other things, until April 5. Students that read enough books will also receive a prize: skating at Reva Rollerdrome in Auburn for free.

“It seemed like a catchy phrase,” Case said. “Everybody liked it.”

That seems to include the students. Nathan Lloyd, Katie McCarthy and Lydia Cox all said they are finding the bug-theme to be really exciting.

“He gave us facts about bugs that probably some people never knew,” McCarthy, 10, of Jordan said of Pod's talk. “I didn't know dragonflies lived underwater.”

Cox, 7, of Cato said she once saw two praying mantises in her corn field and now knows more about them.

“I actually saw them fly,” she said.

Cox knows how important it is to read, and says she reads eight books a week, cover to cover.

“They make us learn a lot,” she said.