This week in science, Mighty Oaks have been investigating the components and functions of blood. Following on from their learning about blood vessels and the heart, the children began looking at the components of blood and the various functions they carry out. We watched a short clip of a blood sample being spun in a centrifuge, and set about making our own samples.
We used safe household ingredients to create samples, with different elements representing the main components of human blood. We used cooking oil to represent the golden-yellow plasma, and coloured water to represent the red blood cells. We added small amounts of sprinkles that represented white blood cells and platelets to our mixture to understand the proportions of these different components.
We also thought carefully about the functions the different components of blood perform, and whether we thought these would be present in the blood of different living things.
Mr Stanley shared some information about his own blood! Mr Stanley is a blood donor, and has AB positive blood. AB+ blood is very rare, found in just 2% of the population. It’s important for the production of plasma, which is used in the treatment of burns and trauma. Mr Stanley shared a photo of his recent donation and where it ended up – Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
