Amidst piles of glitter, gaggles of giggling kids sat outside with their teachers and guardians to read books and make bookmarks at the John William Decas School’s Bring a Book to the Beach Day.

Decas Principal Donna Noonan said the activity was meant to promote Wareham’s summer reading program, and that she brought the idea for the day with her from her old school.

“It’s a really low-key way of helping to promote summer reading,” Noonan said. “What we know is that kids who don’t practice reading over the summer … can slide back anything from a few months to several months of what they learned over the course of the year.”

Noonan said the entire school was scheduled to participate in the day, and that they were broken into six different sections of about 100 children. The students were then further divided into smaller reading groups, in which parents and teachers would read the books the children picked out.

There were also three small, plastic swimming pools filled with books, which Noonan termed, “trading pools,” where children could leave or pick out books they wanted to read, and even take home.

“We recycle some of the books we’ve culled for them over the course of the last couple weeks, and we just put them into the pools,” Noonan said. “Everyone leaves with a book, whether they brought one, or not.”

There was also a bookmark-making station, and a raffle, where the students could enter to win beach items, like buckets and shovels.

There were also informational packets for parents to bring home that included the students’ summer reading lists, for both Wareham and the general Scholastic reading list. The packets also had online reading resources for parents, and memory exercises so the children could more concretely understand the books they would be reading. One of these exercises was a “reader robot”, a paper cutout of a robot the children will fill out with information from one of the books they will read over the summer.

“The plot goes somewhere, the favorite characters … the story, the author … they identify all the essential parts of a story, or a book, and then they bring it back to school,” said Jenna Lehane, the Decas school counselor. “It’s a good way to keep it fun.”

Parent Amanda Strachan said she thought the activity was a good idea.

“I think it gets the kids encouraged to read, and it gets the parents encouraged to read to them, as well,” Strachan said.