MORE than 20 Langwathby school children spent a day at Rheged creating a sparkling display of sea life.

The five and six year olds' nautical day included not only dressing up as mermaids, pirates (pictured right) and divers but also producing a huge dolphin scene to help celebrate the forthcoming launch of the new giant film Dolphins, which is showing twice daily at Rheged.

The children's class teacher, Chris Hetherington, said: "Children absolutely love dolphins and we saw this as a fantastic opportunity to involve them not only with the chance to see this wonderful film on a screen the size of six double decker buses, but also to display their artwork of which we are so proud."

The children used paint, fabric, salt dough, papier mach and silk-painting to create a 6ft x 7ft panel of dolphins, sea anemones, jelly fish, clams and lots of fish to produce a huge montage that will be displayed at Rheged until the end of August. It will then be installed at Langwathby Primary School to be used as a role-play area for the children to use in their project on the sea.

Next term, the children will be studying many different aspects of the sea - from dolphins and other creatures that live in it, to the way we use the sea for industry and tourism.

Rheged marketing and sales manager Claire Logan said: " We are always really happy to involve the local community wherever possible and this provided us with a wonderful chance to involve a local school - if we can inspire the children by not only showing them such an enchanting and inspiring adventure film and also displaying their dolphin-related work, then we hope their project next term will be all the more interesting and relevant for them."