Colors and shapes tend to get filed under "easy toddler stuff," separate from the more serious business of numbers and counting. In reality, they're doing a lot of quiet groundwork for math skills that show up a year or two later, in ways that aren't obvious at the time.
Sorting objects by shape — this one's round, this one has corners — is the same mental skill a child will later use to sort numbers into odd and even, or group objects for basic multiplication. Learning to spot what makes a triangle different from a square is an early form of the pattern recognition that math leans on constantly.
"Put all the red ones here" is a simple instruction, but it requires the child to compare multiple objects against a single attribute and separate them accordingly — which is essentially the same logic behind sorting and comparing quantities later on. A child who's had a lot of practice grouping by color usually picks up grouping by number with less friction.
Recognizing that a stop sign is roughly a shape with eight sides, or that a slice of pizza looks like a triangle, is a child's first informal exposure to geometry — years before the word itself shows up in a textbook. That early, playful familiarity tends to make formal geometry feel less foreign when it's introduced properly in school.
A simple activity like counting how many corners a shape has, or how many red objects are on a table, directly combines shape and color recognition with counting — which is exactly the kind of blended practice that makes the eventual jump into arithmetic smoother.
If your child is still working on colors and shapes and hasn't moved on to numbers yet, that's not a delay — it's the actual foundation numbers will sit on top of. There's no need to rush past this stage to get to "real" math sooner.
Every color and shape lesson your child sits through now is quietly paying forward into how comfortable math feels a year or two down the road.