Your body has lots of different ways of healing itself. If you cut your skin and start to bleed, your body starts to repair it straight away. Read on to find out how.

   

When you bleed, your blood helps to clean your wound. The platelets in your blood rush to the place where your skin has broken. They thicken and start to clot the blood. In other words, the blood gets all lumpy so that it can plug up the breaks. When the blood clot dries into a scab it protects the wound until your new skin grows. After a while the scab will fall off and your new skin will look pink at first.

Any damage or break to your skin is called a wound. Have you ever hurt yourself in the following ways?

Cut: this is usually caused by a sharp blade or piece of glass.

Graze: this is what happens when you have a sliding fall and the top of your skin is scraped off.

Bruise: this is a bang that doesn't break the skin, but bursts the blood vessels underneath it.

Puncture: this is caused by a thin pointed object such as a needle or nail.

Sometimes you might need to give your body a helping hand to make sure that your wounds don't become infected. The instructions below explain how you can do this, but at the moment they're all muddled up. Can you work out what order they should be in?

               1                     2                    3                     4                    5

The correct order is