Meteorite Activities
The lessons below are teacher-favorite lessons focused on meteorites. For more search options or to search by other science target, missions and other criteria, visit our Fast Lesson Finder. You can also search by curriculum standards on our popular Curriculum Standards Quilts.
Meteors & Meteorites Lessons:
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries (Main Portal)
Topic: Modeling Solar System Objects
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: Meteorites are pieces of asteroids that have fallen to Earth; they hold clues to the formation of our solar system. This set of activities investigates meteorite features, characteristics, their connection to asteroids, and the keys they hold to the formation of the planets. These activities are primarily hands-on modeling activities.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 1 Noblesville Fall
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: Students will listen to the story of an actual meteorite fall and brainstorm on what they want to know and how they would react. The questions students generate will relate directly to the units contained in Exploring Meteorite Mysteries and will help teachers focus students' attention on meteorite investigations. After making a list of what they want to know, they will view a slide show introduction to meteorites.
View the Slide Set Online
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries Slide Set (Power Point, 66.72 MB)
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 11 Changes Inside Planets
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: In this lesson students will observe and describe differentiated samples in the Meteorite Sample Disk (or photographs). They will conduct an experiment using gelatin and food that illustrates planetary differentiation. Hard boiled eggs model the break-up of differentiated planetary bodies.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 14 Direct Hit at the K-T Boundary
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: In this lesson, students explore information about the effects of large impacts. A critical thinking activity helps students select the likely impact site associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 15 Historical Meteorite Falls
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson contains five reading selections and associated questions. The readings and questions are mostly about the responses of people to meteor and meteorite falls.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 16 Near Miss
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson involves the students in creative interactions by asking them to take on the roles of community members who react to a large and frightening, but not devastating, impact. There are two activities which require different research and modes of response.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 17 Asteroid Resources
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: In teams, students wil research and document some of the requirements for mounting an expedition to an asteroid. Activity B allows the students to simulate a miniature mining expedition of an edible asteroid.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 18 Antarctic Meteorite Teams
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson is designed to enhance students' awareness of scientific career possibilities and requirements. A series of
slides will provide students with background information about expeditions to Antarctica to recover meteorites.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 19 The Daily Shooting Star
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: The Daily Shooting Star uses a tabloid format to generate interest in meteorites. The articles may be used as an introduction or preassessment before any lessons are started, or it may be a final assessment after the units are completed.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 10 Building Blocks of Planets
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: In Activity A students will observe and describe chondrite meteorites. In Activity B they will experiment with balloons and static electricity to illustrate the theories about how dust particles collected into larger clusters. In Activity C students will manipulate magnetic marbles and steel balls to dramatically illustrate the accretion of chondritic material into larger bodies like planets and asteroids.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 12 Building Blocks of Life
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: The team activities in this lesson explore the important materials carbonaceous chondrites brought to Earth. A jumbled letter activity leads students to look at the amino acids found in carbonaceous chondrites as the building blocks of life. Students also experiment with growing yeast in mediums that represent carbonaceous chondrite material.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 13 Solving a Mystery
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This is a culminating lesson in four parts. It is designed to follow meteorite identification activities. A minimum sequence is Lessons 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 13.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 2 Follow the Falling Meteorite
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: In the activities in this lesson students use sound to easily demonstrate basic triangulation techniques. They also triangulate using a meteor's path to predict where meteorites might be found. Extended math applications may be added. Students also develop a treasure hunt map in the final activity.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 3 Searching for Meteorites
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: Water balloons filled with flour and pebbles help students model the distribution of materials after meteorite impacts.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 4 The Meteorite-Asteroid Connection: Orbits in the Inner Solar System
Grade Level: 9-12
Body: Asteroids, Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson allows students to understand how meteorites get from the asteroid belt to Earth and how rare it is for the Earth to be hit by a large asteroid. The students will build an exact scale model of the inner solar system.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 5 Looking at Asteroids
Grade Level: 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson is about the connection between meteorites and asteroids. The activities in this lesson focus on ways to look at asteroids because some scientists think that some meteorites are fragments of asteroids. The lesson centers on remote sensing techniques using light.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 6 Impact Craters-Holes in the Ground
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson allows students to create impact craters in plaster of Paris or layered dry materials. They perform controlled experiments by varying the velocity or mass of an object and observing and measuring the effects.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 7 Crater Hunters
Grade Level: 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: After viewing slides of craters on other planets, the Moon, and Earth, students will locate impact craters on Earth using longitude and latitude and various maps. Students will locate potential sites of impacts, and plan the necessary research to verify their observations.
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 8 Edible Rocks
Grade Level: 5-8, 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: This lesson has been designed as a comfortable introduction to describing meteorites. It helps students become better observers by making a connection between the familiar (candy bars) and the unfamiliar (meteorites).
Exploring Meteorite Mysteries: Lesson 9 Meteorite Sleuths
Grade Level: 9-12
Body: Meteors & Meteorites
Short Description: The activities in this lesson focus on observation and examination skills. A Meteorite Sample Disk (or photos) will be at the center of four laboratory stations. Students will use several degrees of magnification to research meteorites in the Meteorite Sample Disk and other materials. Discussing the sequence will help them understand how scientists approach meteorite research and classification.
Solar System Exploration Mission Timeline Activity
Topic: Modeling Solar System Objects
Grade Level: 5-8
Body: Our Solar System, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Asteroids, Meteors & Meteorites, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Dwarf Planets, Comets, Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud, Earth's Moon, Europa
Mission: ARTEMIS (Earth's Moon), Cassini (Saturn), Dawn (Dwarf Planets), DSN (Our Solar System), GRAIL (Earth's Moon), Hubble (Beyond Our Solar System), Huygens (Saturn), IBEX (Our Solar System), InSight (Mars), Juno (Jupiter), Lunar Recon Orbiter (Earth's Moon), MESSENGER (Mercury), NEAR Shoemaker (Asteroids), New Horizons (Dwarf Planets), Phoenix (Mars), Stardust (Comets), Venus Express (Venus), Viking 01 (Mars), Viking 02 (Mars), Voyager 1 (Our Solar System), Voyager 2 (Our Solar System)
Short Description: Extreme Exploration -- Solar System Exploration Missions Timeline involves students in the wide range of mission events of 2008-2015+. Using the Solar System Exploration Timeline poster as a guide, student teams research assigned missions and record events such as launch and landing, etc. It is expected that students will be drawn into the excitement of mission events as they follow along with NASA's Solar System Exploration -- past, current, and future.
