3^rd Grade and Up

Welcome to I Don’t Vant to Suck Your Blood Smoothie Shop, where all products are 100% blood-free!
That’s good news for humans but bad news for a thirsty vampire who just wants a pint of O-positive. With a little help from a friend, he’ll realize that blood isn’t a beverage. Humans need it! Blood delivers oxygen and nutrients, helps fight infections, and much more.

What a clever and fun way to learn about the inner workings of blood.

I was surprised and thrilled when I found out Stacy McAnulty was writing another book about a mythical monster explaining how a part of the human body works. I had fun speaking with a vampiric accent. Plus, I like the illustration style in this book more than the style in the brain book.

I was looking forward to learning about different blood types and what makes them different. But it turns out that scientists are still trying to understand why our species developed blood types.

This book talks about donating blood, a subject that makes me feel queasy. I’m fine with blood. It’s the needle in the arm that freaks me out. I’ve had my blood drawn before, and it felt like I was being drained. This makes sense because, technically, I was being drained. Even though the process makes me dizzy, I feel like I should donate blood at least once. According to this book, it helps save lives, ‘someone in the U.S. needs a blood transfusion every two seconds.’ If I do donate, I want to find out what my blood type is. I’m twenty-eight years old. I should know that by now.

Here are a few blood facts that I found the most thought-provoking:

• About 10% of a grown-up’s weight is blood. For an average man, that’s about 9.6 to 12 pints or 1.2 to 1.5 gallons).
• A healthy adult can donate 1 pint of blood every fifty-six days with no negative effects.
• There are small amounts of gold in blood. If we could mine that gold, we’d get about 0.2 milligrams, which is about the weight of a mosquito.

I’m hoping Stacy McAnulty will continue this series. Maybe with a werewolf kid teaching about how hair grows?

Ending question: Does anyone else think the adult vampire looks a little like the Count from Sesame Street?