Human Body - Week 3 - Blood Activity

Week 3: We made our version of human blood.

At first glance it probably looks like we made a delicious fruit salad. Well we did, but it was also a science project. We referenced the book The Way We Work by David Macaulay to learn about what's in our blood. From there we used food to represent the various components. Then we ate our blood.

This is what went in.

Red blood cells give our blood the red color and make up ninety-nine percent of cells in the blood. Strawberries were our red blood cells.

Platelets are very tiny. Their purpose is to help blood clot and heal wounds. Plates are born from bone marrow cells called megakaryocyte. The banana was our megakarycyte and the platelets were the tiny banana pieces.

The white blood cells were the apples and the grapes. Apples were the lymphocytes and grapes were the neutraphils. Since my daughter Jemma is currently receiving chemotherapy as part of her Leukemia treatment she has very few neutraphils. Neutraphils kill germs. Her blood is checked about twice each week and we watch her neutraphil count very closely. Since she had zero neutraphils four days before we did this project and was hospitalized for a fever we had her take care of the grapes. That we she could have a few neutraphils.

Bacteria and viruses were kept far away from Jemma. I took care of these.

Most of our blood is made up of a watery liquid called plasma. Our plasma was yogurt.

We added the red blood cells (strawberries), platelets (bananas), white blood cells (apples and grapes), bacteria (celery), and viruses (broccoli) to our plasma (yogurt) and mixed to create blood.

Then we enjoyed our blood.

This is only Week 3 in a Human Body Unit Study packed full of hands-on projects. Please visit again to see future projects. The links are posted on our Science Page.

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