Circulatory System

Your circulatory system is sort of like the transportation system of your body. It carries and distributes things like nutrients, sugars, and oxygen to different parts of your body and collects waste for removal.

Blood

If your circulatory system is the transportation system of the body, blood is the vehicle. Blood is the liquid that actually transports oxygen, nutrients, waste, and other substances.

Waste from your body is picked up and transported by blood to your kidneys. Carbon dioxide waste is carried in your blood to your lungs, where it is exhaled. Your blood also has cells from your immune system that fight diseases and heal injuries.

Blood contains:

Plasma: The liquid in your blood that carries most of the substances that need to be transported, like sugar (glucose), nutrients, minerals, vitamins, carbon dioxide, and waste.
Red Blood Cells: Cells that carry oxygen to your body’s cells.
White Blood Cells: Cells from your immune system that fight disease.
Platelets: Cell fragments that clot blood (stop the bleeding when you get a cut).

Heart

Your heart is the engine of the circulatory system. It pumps blood to different parts of your body. Your heart is made of four chambers: left atrium, right atrium, left ventricle, right ventricle.

Oxygen-rich blood flows from your lungs to the left side of your heart, first through the left atrium and then to the left ventricle. From there it is pumped to the rest of your body through the aorta, a large powerful artery. The oxygenated blood moves through your body, releasing oxygen and collecting carbon dioxide. The deoxygenated blood returns to your heart through the right atrium and gets pumped back to your lungs from your right ventricle. Once in the lungs, the blood collects oxygen and releases carbon dioxide, starting the process over again.

Blood Vessel

Blood vessels are like the roads and highways or the circulatory system. When your body pumps oxygenated blood to the rest of your body, it is carried by blood vessels.

Blood vessels that carry blood away from the heart are called arteries. Because arteries need to regulate how much blood flows to each part of your body, they have muscular walls that can expand and contract to let more of less blood flow through. From the arteries, blood moves into tiny blood vessels called capillaries that deliver blood directly to the cells in your body.

After your blood has dropped off oxygen, glucose, and nutrients to your cells and picked up carbon dioxide and other wastes, blood starts to make its trip back to the heart in blood vessels called veins. To keep blood traveling back to the heart in the right direction, veins have one-way valves that allow blood to only move in one direction.

Bulleted List:

Oxygenated blood from lungs
Left Atrium
Left Ventricle
Aorta to other arteries
Capillaries (exchange of oxygenated blood for deoxygenated blood)
Veins
Right Atrium
Right Ventricle
Lungs for oxygenation and then the cycle begins again.

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