Phil Chenier takes time to show the kids the pictures. Josh Sekine/Wizards Photos

"It's good to be apart of this with a player like Brendan Haywood, who I enjoyed reading along side of today," Chenier said.

Hundreds of children crowded the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to take part in the celebration event themed "Adventures in Reading." A large group of kids greeted the basketball stars of past and present in the Peter Rabbit's Garden exhibit to hear the two read to them.

"I think a lot of the kids look up to myself and the other players," said Haywood. "So when they hear the people that they see as celebrities tell them that they need to read and concentrate on their studies, then they might take it a little bit more serious then it coming from their teachers."

The goal of the Reading Is Fundamental program is to develop and deliver children's and family literacy programs that help prepare kids for reading and motivate school-age children to read regularly.

The program serves kids and families in every state, the District of Columbia and U.S. offshore territories through programs that operate in schools, libraries, community centers, child-care centers, hospitals, migrant worker camps, Head Start and Even Start programs, homeless shelters and detention centers.

The Reading Is Fundamental program and the National Basketball Association have been long-term allies in the challenge to get kids to start reading. The NBA launched their Read To Achieve program last year in association with Reading Is Fundamental. The program includes donations of over 200,000 books through a variety of reading events and book fairs, and the annual star-studded All-Star Read to Achieve celebration held during the NBA All-Star Weekend.

"This is a very good program in the sense that it introduces a lot of these youngsters to reading and it lessens the load in terms of knowing that reading is fundamental, reading is important and reading is educational, but reading can also be entertaining and fun," Chenier said.

The Reading Is Fundamental program provided 15 million new, free books and other essential literacy resources to nearly 5 million children last year alone. In their 35-year history, the program had places more than 200 million books in the hands and homes of America's children.