Homeschool Unit Study Human Body. Hands-on Activity 4. Making Blood + What Are the Components of Blood Minibook

The human body lapbook was free for a limited time.

No unit study about the human body is done right without making some blood and learning about the valuable components of it.

What is Blood Made of?

Besides, that is the best way to learn about the four basic components of blood.

At the bottom, I shared the video that helped us to kick off this activity and also helped us to pick out the ingredients.

Look at the ingredients we used, again, which we had on hand at the house.

■plastic bottle
■marshmallows (we only the big ones, so we cut up a few of the big ones)
■mini box of chocolate cereal that the boys didn’t like
■raisins
■corn syrup and water
■yellow and red die
■salt

So after we gathered all of our supplies and a funnel and bowl or two, we started.

First Tiny poured the corn syrup in and mixed with a bit of water (not too much).

Mostly we used the corn syrup because I wanted it to look more like blood plasma in the beginning.

Homeschool Unit Study Human Body.

So he added yellow dye and some salt to represent the plasma.

We added salt to help him remember that though plasma is mostly made up of water, it also contains proteins, sugar and hormones. So adding the salt was just to help him remember some of the make up of plasma.

Next, we took our chocolate cereal and mixed in some red dye and coated it pretty good.

I liked the fact that the “red blood cells” started to give it color because they make up about 40 to 45% of the color.

Since red blood cells are round and look a little bit like a doughnut, without the hole in the middle, this round cereal was a pretty good imitation.

He started to add in the red dyed cereal to represent the red blood cells (or erythrocytes).

Next came a bite or two of marshmallows or rather he added in some of the white marshmallows to represent the white blood cells (or leukocytes), but not too many of them.

Since I had raisins, we added a few of them to represent blood platelets (or thrombocytes).

We ended up with something nice and gross that he liked, but it sure helped him to remember the 4 basic components of blood.

Also, here are some free resources about blood:

• Middle School Lesson Plan. 3 page .pdf How does the Cardiovascular system work? Actually lessons for K to 6th.
• Another hands-on activity. Blood Cell basics for younger grades.
• How Much Blood Do You Have? 20 page .pdf for middle and high school
• Cool wheel template 7 page .pdf template wheel for middle and high school teaching blood type.
• What is Blood? You Tube Really helpful to us when deciding how to color our blood, meaning we started with yellow first.

Grab all of hands-on activities below.

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Hope you like this as much as we enjoyed learning about it today.
Hugs and love ya,