Preschool shape activities help your child develop early math skills.

Although recognizing objects as red or blue, round or square might seem like child’s play, it’s actually integral to a young child’s cognitive development, and sets the stage for math concepts from sorting and patterning to geometry, and beyond!

For this activity, we used a variety of objects, such as blocks, legos, plates, jewels, and beads in a sorting activity. Sorting is a beginning math skill. It may seem that a big chunk early math is about learning numbers and quantity, but there’s much more to it. By sorting, children understand that things are alike and different as well as that they can belong and be organized into certain groups.

Getting practice with sorting at an early age is important for numerical concepts and grouping numbers and sets when they’re older. This type of thinking starts them on the path of applying logical thinking to objects, mathematical concepts and every day life in general.

Studies have even been shown that kids who are used to comparing and contrasting do better in mathematics later on.