Year 5 Line and Shape Art Lessons: Nested Squares
Squares within squares, colours that play tricks on the eye, and artwork you can play a game on! These Year 5 Line and Shape Art Lessons bring together creative choices, careful drawing and a little friendly competition.
How much can you do with a square? Inspired by Josef Albers and Kenneth Noland, students discover how repeated shapes and neighbouring colours can change the way an artwork feels. A simple arrangement can seem calm, energetic or full of depth, depending on the choices they makHow much can you do with a square? Inspired by Josef Albers and Kenneth Noland, students discover how repeated shapes and neighbouring colours can change the way an artwork feels. A simple arrangement can seem calm, energetic or full of depth, depending on the choices they make.
These Year 5 Line and Shape Art Lessons give precision a creative purpose. Students practise spacing, ruler control and grid-based arrangements while exploring colour and personal expression through clay, painting and digital art-making.
Nested Squares, Colour and a Game to Play
Nested squares provide a clear starting point for exploring how shapes fit together. Students consider the spaces between their lines and how one colour looks beside another, then develop their ideas through painted compositions. Personal images and symbols give them opportunities to connect colour choices with a particular mood.
The clay project brings that careful planning into a playable Nine Men’s Morris games board. Students first try the game on paper, discovering why the lines and positions matter before making their own clay board. It gives accurate placement a practical purpose, and a finished artwork they can enjoy using.
Digital activities extend the same ideas through nested shapes, colour and shadow effects. Students explore how a flat arrangement can appear to have depth, bringing their developing skills together in an individual digital composition.
Meet the Artists Behind the Squares
Josef Albers’s Study for Homage to the Square: “Persistent” invites students to look closely at what happens when colours sit inside and beside one another. His repeated square format provides a clear example of how much can change while the basic shape stays familiar. Students explore these relationships through their own colour choices.
Kenneth Noland’s Beginning offers a contrasting arrangement of concentric circles. Comparing the two artworks helps students recognise shared ideas about nested shapes, repetition and colour, even when the artists use different forms. These examples give students a starting point for experimentation across their own artworks.
“Miss, it looks like an egg!”
While my Year 5 class was comparing Albers’s artworks on the big screen, one student explained why a particular colour arrangement was his favourite:
“Miss, it looks like an egg. The yellow is the yolk, the white is the egg white, the grey is the shell, and the blue is the wrapper.”
That observation set the whole discussion going. Suddenly, everyone was finding something in their favourite artwork and explaining why its colours worked best. Weeks later, those conversations are still shaping the colours students want to use on their clay game boards. I chose black and white playing pieces so each student’s colour choices could remain the focus.
Where This Sits in the CampFire Pathway
This Year 5 unit is one of eleven year-level units in CampFire, the Drawing Toolkit’s connected Line and Shape pathway from Foundation to Year 10. Nested Squares develops students’ control of spacing, alignment and colour relationships while encouraging purposeful choices in their compositions.
Each unit has its own artists, focus and Studio Work while sharing a reliable structure of ten weekly Core Skills mini-lessons, hands-on and digital art-making, quizzes and reflection. Teach Year 5 as a standalone ten-week journey or alongside other year levels in the full CampFire Line and Shape pathway.
Who Are These Year 5 Line and Shape Art Lessons For?
This unit suits Year 5 classroom teachers wanting a ready-to-teach, well-structured art term, as well as Visual Arts specialists developing students’ precision and planning. Familiar shapes and guided activities provide clear starting points, while colour, pattern and personal symbols leave room for individual expression.
Ready-to-teach lesson slides, a Teacher Guide, a Quiz Book with answers and a Posters Pack are included, together with Australian Curriculum v9 planning support. A printable games board template and take-home game instructions are also included, so students can enjoy playing with family and friends. Shared weekly skills keep the class learning together, while Studio Work allows students to progress at different paces.
Give a simple square a colourful new purpose, and bring a little friendly competition into the art room.
Explore other year levels in the full CampFire: Line and Shape collection.
