Build your blood

“Build your blood” is a hands-on activity which can be easily adapted for public engagement and outreach events.

In this activity, children create their own blood sample using beads, glitter/confetti, and tissue paper to represent red and white blood cells, platelets, and plasma. The twist is that they first draw a “disease card”, describing for example a clotting disorder or mild anaemia. From this, the blood sample can be built accordingly.

This activity is highly visual, interactive, and adaptable to different age groups. This activity also works very well alongside other blood activities, e.g. making a blood clot (red slime).

For this activity, the following materials are required:

• Test tubes/falcons to make the 'blood sample'
• Red beads (representing red blood cells)
• White beads (representing white blood cells)
• Silver confetti (representing platelets)
• Yellow tissue (representing plasma)
• Disease cards (attached, along with an accessible text-only Word document)