Circulatory System Facts for Kids

A Picture of the Circulatory System
  • System: Circulatory
  • System Name: The Circulatory System
  • Location: Throughout the body via blood vessels
  • Purpose: Transport blood cells, oxygen and nutrients
  • Organs: Heart, lungs and blood vessels (arteries, capillaries and veins)

15 Circulatory System Facts for Kids

  1. The circulatory system is a human biological system that helps circulates blood throughout the body.
  2. The circulatory system is also known as the vascular system or the cardiovascular system.
  3. The circulatory system is what transport oxygen and nutrients to tissue all throughout the body.
  4. The circulatory system has two main components, the systemic circulation and pulmonary circulation.
  5. The systemic circulation is the process of oxygen-rich blood flowing from the heart and deoxygenated blood flowing back to into the heart.
  6. The pulmonary circulation is the process of deoxygenated blood flowing from the heart into the lungs and oxygen-rich blood flowing from the lungs back into the heart.
  7. If you laid out all the blood vessels in circulatory system into a straight line, it would be around 60,000 miles in length. In theory, you have enough blood vessels in your body to wrap around the Earth 2.5 times.
  8. An average adult human has between 10 and 12 pints of blood flowing through their circulatory system.
  9. There are five different types of blood vessels that make up the human circulatory system, and they are the arteries, arterioles, capillaries, venules and veins.
  10. The arteries carry oxygenated blood from the heart to other parts of the human body.
  11. The arterioles control the speed at which blood flows throughout the body, also known as blood pressure.
  12. The capillaries control the distribution of blood to tissue and help transport deoxygenated blood to the venules.
  13. The venules help transport deoxygenated blood from the capillaries and feed it into the veins.
  14. The veins carry deoxygenated blood back to the heart.
  15. The lungs play an important role in the circulatory system which is known as pulmonary circulation. The lungs bring in deoxygenated blood from the heart and return oxygen-rich blood back to the heart. They also release carbon dioxide from the blood through expiration (exhaling).

Additional Resources on the Human Circulatory System

About the author
Facts Editor

This is an author profile for articles that are created from a collaborative effort. It is not uncommon that articles on this site were either written, researched or fact checked by several authors and team members. So this author profile will be displayed to reflect that. Our team of editors, writers and fact checkers do extensive research before publishing articles on the site, and we do our best to provide the most accurate information possible.