Making Blood

One week we learned about the human body.  One of the demonstrations for that week was to "make blood".  We took Cheerios colored with red food coloring for the red blood cells, mini marshmallows for the white blood cells, yellow tinged water/corn syrup for plasma and red lentils for platelets.  We learned what each element of the blood is responsible for and then mixed them all together.  We also learned that if you put all of your blood vessels end to end, they would go around the Earth almost two times!

Germs

Swabbing the shoes

With all of the samples

A nickel

Alex's mouth

Alex's shoe after a week (with hand sanitizer (a drop) in the middle.

Alex's hand with regular hand soap (not antibacterial) in the middle.

One week this summer we did an experiment where we swabbed various surfaces and then used homemade agar plates to see what would grow from these swabs.  It was interesting to watch the results come about.  A nickel did not produce much, which was somewhat surprising.  I was trying to get a dollar bill swabbed, but I was outvoted.  I think that the dollar bill would have produced a lot more.  What grew from the bottom of the shoes was disgusting.  There was a whole host of things that grew and it supported our not wearing shoes in the house!  We also tested out regular hand soap and magic soap or hand sanitizer.  Both of these did prevent things from growing in the area where they were  placed.  This was a fun experiment and thanks to the great instructions in the book, "Kitchen Science Experiments:  How Does Your Mold Garden Grow?", by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, the agar plates were easy to make.