I’ve been looking forward to making a model of blood for a long time for our anatomy science lessons, because I thought I had 5 different models of blood pinned on my anatomy board. I don’t. So, I re-started from scratch and modified what is in our anatomy textbook (affiliate link).
Alternatively titled: How to make a model of blood using what’s in your kitchen (but that’s too much of a mouthful).
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Supplies for the model of blood:
Mixing Bowl
How to make a model of blood step-by-step
1. Measure out 1 cup of light corn syrup. Start to do this and discover the old bottle you had, was THAT OLD and throw it away because it won’t pour. That and there was something suspicious in the bottom of the bottle. EWWWWWW.
This is the plasma, which makes up most of your blood and is a light straw color
2. Pour your corn syrup into the bowl. (For the rest of the steps I’ll combine this into one) I wanted to highlight part of what makes our experiments go smoother, I move the steps around so everyone gets to do things, AND try to make sure everyone gets to pour and measure.
3. Measure out 3/4 cup of RED jelly beans (or red hots, no one likes red hots so we got jelly beans). Pour them into the bowl, making sure to get the ones stuck to your measuring cup out.
These represent red blood cells. Red blood cells do all the delivery work bringing food and air to the other cells and carrying away the waste.
4. Stir your mixture around. Notice how the red jelly beans give the appearance of red to the plasma.
5. Drop in your single white jelly bean and stir it around.
This represents the white blood cell, in this scale model of a WELL person’s blood, there are not very many white blood cells. The number goes up when you are sick.
6. Shake in the candy sprinkles. Each of my kids was given a chance to shake in some platelets, so we may have had more platelets than strictly necessary.
The candy sprinkles are the platelets. Platelets are the everyman of your blood. They make up the scabs you get, they repair problems in your blood vessels, and they do all the dirty work.
7. Finally record what you noticed as you made your model of blood. This particular time the kids records weren’t the best. They were too excited about the big huge mess they’d made making it. That and keeping it to show Daddy.
Come back next week for our lesson on blood types.
Model of Blood posts elsewhere
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