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Is Your Blood Type Compatible?

The youngest is learning about the human body this year. In the past, we've done a lot of experiments with the human body, but this one experiment was really fun learning about blood types.

Here is another activity we've done on blood: http://meanttoteach.blogspot.com/2014/04/blood.html
I'll eventually get a chance to group all of our human body activities because I have more on my blog.

There are 4 blood types: O, A, B, and AB. We discussed what a donor was, what a receiver was, and why it matters for doctors to know if the blood types are compatible when someone donates blood. We talked about antigens and how a patient could become very sick if their body rejects new blood.

This experiment was simple.

All you need is:
Two colors of food coloring (Red and Blue work best, but I only had yellow and blue. So that's what we did.)
Water
Dry Erase Marker

1. Fill each cup halfway with water.
2. With the dry erase marker, label each cup with one blood type.
3. In the cup labeled A, put in 2 drops of red coloring.
4. In the cup labeled B, put 2 drops of blue coloring.
5. In the cup labeled AB, put in 2 drops of blue and 2 drops of red coloring.
6. Stir the water to blend colors in.
7. The cup labeled O is left with clear water.

Continued steps to start experiment:
1. To determine if the blood types are compatible, choose one cup of water to be your donor blood type.
2. Look at what will happen if you were to pour that water into each of the other cups (the receivers).
3. If the water of the receiver cup changes color, then the blood types are not compatible. If the water doesn't change color, then that blood type can receive your donor blood.
4. We put a check mark if the receiver blood can accept the donor blood and an x if it couldn't.

You can find this experiment with the chart at learninandearnin.com.

My youngest thought this was so fun and she is type O blood. So she loved figuring out that her blood type is the universal donor (able to give to all other blood types).



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