Clustering around cotton candy, crafts, and more, kids and their families took full advantage of Thursday’s CARE fair, sprawling in orderly chaos across the pavement in front of the Middle School.

This summer saw the 10th annual Community, Academic, Recreation and Enrichment fair, following five weeks of focused, hands-on learning that CARE Director Jane Fondulis said was a bit of a (positive) “trick” for the students.

“It’s academic. They have learned things and done things that they don’t get the chance to do during day school,” Fondulis said.

There were quite a few things on display from this year’s summer program projects, which all focused on construction, using duct tape in creative ways. One group made a small hockey challenge game, in which the puck and the hockey sticks were created with duct tape, while other students made necklaces and pencil cases out of the stuff.

“One group made the town of Wareham,” Fondulis said. “It was whatever the groups decided.”

In order to raise funds for a charitable cause of the program’s choosing, students also made birdhouses and bird seed feeders, baked cookies, and grew sunflower seedlings to sell. This raked in some revenue, along with the usual cotton candy, popcorn, and snow-ice for sale.

“This year, the kids have a couple of suggestions, so we are going to sit down and decide where it’s going to go,” Fondulis said. “I know that some of it is going to go to the two families whose mobile homes just burned. … Two of the kids [from one of the families] are in our program.”

The outdoor fair was followed by an almost two-hour presentation, in which the kids showed off some of the things they had been working on for five weeks in their different classes. One group had a 10-minute video they made in partnership with WCTV, while others showed off dancing, singing, acting, and even violin skills.

“All those kids who took the violin want to continue it for the long haul,” Fondulis said. “We are even seeing if they can play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ at Illumination Night, when all the candles are lit.”

Fondulis said she can’t pick any one specific year of CARE she likes the most, but she said she had more parents than ever before telling her how their children could not stop talking about what they were learning and doing in the program. She chalks this up, in part, to the extra day added to the CARE week, giving kids more opportunities for field trips to places like Boston art museums and Cape Cod’s natural history museum.

“We had two or three field trips going out per day, and then had all [260] students going out every Friday,” Fondulis said. “The things those kids did – [the parents] said, ‘We wouldn’t have been able to do those things over the summer. … We opened their eyes to so many things they ordinarily wouldn’t see.”

It was also one of the first years Fondulis saw the older kids take the younglings under their wings.

“It was really sweet … the older kids, they really embraced the little guys,” Fondulis said. “They buddied up, and we didn’t even ask them to. They watched them in the auditorium, they made sure they got on the right bus when we were dismissing – they just automatically seemed to pick up a buddy, and mentor them.”

Fondulis said that though the program has less funding than it did in previous years, due to it no longer being a pilot program, she thinks the district has still managed to make it a very fulfilling program for the students who attend.

“We’re just going to keep doing what we are doing – providing a safe place for the kids … and, at the same time, enriching them,” Fondulis said.