Shopping for babies can be very tough. There is just so much advice floating around... it is hard to know what's right and not! Children grow differently, reach milestones at different times, and you never know what they will like and what they won't!
Thankfully, educational toys are a safe bet to go with at any age. These toys are designed to keep your little ones engaged while teaching them valuable academic concepts and improve their fine motor and sensory skills.
Contents
Between the age of 12 to 18 months, some of the critical activities that you can expect your child to learn are running and kicking a ball, understanding music (maybe even a bit of dancing!), stacking together three or more blocks, drinking from a cup, climbing things, pushing and pulling toys and scribbling with crayons (source).
Educational toys can help them in these activities by providing them with a bright and colorful medium to master these tasks.
So without further ado, let's have a look at the best educational toys for 15-month-olds.
OUR TOP PICK
Make your child explore and build anything he or she imagines with these 80 piece mega blocks.
This bundle of joy will help your child be creative and learn new things every single time he or she plays with this mega block building bag. All the blocks in the pack are so colorful and eye-catchy that your child will enjoy playing with the blocks. It is the best game to keep your child engaged and help to learn new things, shapes, and formations every day.
Introducing shapes and colors with the building blocks will become very easy with this award-winning blocks bag. Developing your child's motor skills and making him or her creative is now possible. Your child can explore it's imagination and make it into a reality with this set of building blocks.
The blocks are available in a handy bag. Cleaning the floor after your child is done with playing also becomes convenient. Parents can teach their children to store the blocks inside the bag. It will keep the blocks safe for the next play.
All the blocks are of different shapes and are perfect for little hands to play, make castles, towers, engines, and much more. For early childhood development, the building blocks can be entertaining.
Pros
- The blocks help in creative thinking.
- Developing motor skills at an early age.
- It helps to learn something new and exciting each day.
- Very handy and convenient to store as the blocks come with a storage bag.
Cons
- None that we could think of! There isn't a single child we know who does not enjoy blocks!
EDITORS CHOICE
Learning is fun with VTech Drop and Go Dump Truck. It is designed for six months old to 3 years old kids. This "drop and dump" truck encourages your kids to learn number and counting interactively. It lets your kid drag along the toy truck or transform it into a construction site truck.
The toy truck comes with 2 AAA batteries (for demo purposes only). It includes three colorful boulders. The kids can drop the boulders onto the top of these and watch them tumble onto the bucket. Once the rocks are in the bucket, the kids can push or pull the truck to watch them tumble and shake inside.
The dump truck comes with a hinged bucket. Kids can lift the bucket to unload the boulders and pull down the lever to release. It's how the learning toy inspires the motor skills of the kids. Moreover, it comes with three buttons that play music, phrases, tools and colors. Thus, it helps your kid in getting familiarized with colors and objects.
Moreover, these products are free of harmful chemicals such as Bisphenol A or Bisphenol S. VTech toys come backed with US Safety Certifications, so they are entirely safe for kids.
Pros
- Encourages your kids to learn number and counting in an interactive way.
- Inspires the motor skills.
Cons
- Slightly noisy.
BEST VALUE
Every parent wants their children to be active from the very beginning. Developing your child's motor skills through this VTech Sort and Discover Activity Cube can be very simple.
This game has more than 75 songs for kids to learn with music and rhymes. A musical book page is present, which the child can open and hear his or her favorite nursery rhyme.
The light-up piano keys are an eye-catching feature of the toy. Pressing each number from 1 to 5 will help the toy introduce numbers, colors, and music to the child. The toy has fun features that will help to develop your child's mind in a fun-filled way. Each key has an animal's face on it, which will attract your child's attention and make your baby learn numbers, colors, and rhymes with ease.
Animal spinner is another feature that will help your child to know about different animals, which will help to understand the real facts.
There are four different shaped blocks on the toy, which help to improve hand-eye coordination.
Let your child learn about the basic shapes, which will also help develop your child's motor skills. For making the toy more interactive, there is a section where your child can move the monkey, butterfly, and bird if you combine the animals with storytelling.
Pros
- It keeps your child engaged and helps enhance the learning ability.
- Improves hand-eye coordination with shapes and colorful blocks.
- Enhances motor skills by playing the piano buttons.
- Help playfully learn nursery rhymes.
Cons
- Monkey and butterfly are not very engaging.
RUNNER UP
All those parents who want their children to learn and explore with a musical toy can bring home the leapfrog musical table. Make your child know the music and sounds of musical instruments like guitar, drum, trombone, piano, and much more.
Now your child can flip between learning mode and musical mode with a touch of a button. There are 70 fun tunes your child can explore and learn with the learn and groove musical table.
The musical table can quickly become a floor toy if you remove its legs. It can grow with your baby when your baby can stand on his or her own, add-on the legs to make it a table again.
This toy will help your child learn different music and languages with a section of the bilingual play. Your baby can easily pull, spin, and slide other instruments on the toy. This makes the toy interesting for your baby. Learning English and Spanish becomes very simple.
Learning mode and the different buttons on the toy helps your child to learn numbers, colors, shapes, letters, and much more. This toy is perfect for children up to 36 months. A single toy is capable of teaching your child much more than you can think.
Pros
- The toy grows with your baby.
- Your child learns to distinguish between different musical instruments.
- Learning mode teaches your child about shapes, colors, alphabets, and more.
- A very colorful toy attracts your child's attention.
- Your child learns to sing-a-long with music mode through rhymes.
- A great toy that is easy to assemble and disassemble.
Cons
- It is light in weight and can slide if the baby leans on it.
RUNNER UP
Activity Cubes are useful for a child's development and offer various activities to toddlers and preschoolers. If you are looking for an active cube for your 15-month-old kid, you can opt for Toyventive Wooden Activity Cube.
This active cube combines five games in one and keeps your kids engaged for hours. It helps to develop his or her minds, senses and skills.
It's designed to promote counting and math skills while inspiring color and pattern recognition, hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills in a fun, engaging and interactive way.
It includes an abacus for developing necessary mathematics skills, a shape sorter that makes your child familiarized with basic geometric shapes. The Wooden Activity Cube also includes bead mazes, spinning gears and a learning clock.
This toy facilitates child progress as there are instances where kids need to strain their muscles while searching for appropriate things and fix them.
The front and the rear portion of the bead cube is detachable so that kids can play with them separately. The top flips overs and fits inside the box, which makes the activity cube easily portable.
Pros
- Inspires pattern and shape recognition and hand-eye coordination.
- Develops logical reasoning and fine motor skills.
- Combines five activities in one.
Cons
- It may get messy.
- It's small-sized.
RUNNER UP
According to the experts, "Ideal Kid's toys are those that encourage interaction." If you are looking for an interactive toy for a 15 months old child, Mellissa & Doug First Bead Maze is the perfect stop. It's an interactive and mind-challenging game that helps to develop logical reasoning at a tender age.
Bead Mazes stimulate learning skills of the kids such as hand-eye coordination, color recognition and visual tracking. It helps develop cognitive and reasoning skills as it compels your kids to think of variable paths in the maze.
Youd child will love to see the colorful wooden beads swoop and slide along the Bead Maze from a colored base to the other. By moving beads up, down, left and right, you can introduce concepts that evolve around spatial relationship and directional changes. Pushing the colorful beads over the beads will work those motor skills.
The Bead Maze has four color-coated soft wires that twist and turn between two wooden blocks. With sturdy wood construction, the bead maze will keep your kids engaged for a while.
It is a perfect combination of engagement and fun. As your kids have fun with the bead maze, you will feel glad knowing your kid gets involved with some productive activities.
Pros
- It helps develop cognitive and reasoning skills.
- Inspires hand-eye coordination, color recognition and visual tracking.
- Sturdy wooden construction.
Cons
- The colors fade.
- It is slightly shorter than what's advertised.
RUNNER UP
Who doesn't love a good jigsaw puzzle? Kids will simply adore the beautiful and colorful animal creations made from wood, and the act of putting them in the right shape will help develop their problem solving and fine motor skills.
But before we come to all that - first things first. Children's safety is one of the most important aspects that we have looked at before recommending the toys on this list. And we can tell you for sure that this puzzle set will pass all your safety tests with flying colors.
The puzzle pieces are made from top quality wood, safety tested at an ASTM & CPSIA approved international lab. The entire set is Lead-Free, BPA-Free, and Phthalates-Free. The paint used is non-toxic, water-based. The block pieces themselves have smooth edges and are large enough so that the naught ones cannot swallow them by mistake.
Coming to the puzzles themselves, they are a pack of 4 cute animals: a bear, a ladybug, a butterfly, and a bee. You would notice that these are all colorful animals. You can help your children recognize shapes, colors as well as animals while playing with these puzzles.
The act of solving the puzzle helps develop problem-solving skills. It also helps your little toddlers learn how to concentrate on a task. All in all, you will be able to feel the difference in their hand-eye coordination and attention span if they play with these puzzles regularly.
The colorful toy pieces help children differentiate between different colors and encourage sensory stimulation and brain development.
The toy is a perfect gift item, with the pieces packed attractively in a sturdy carrying pouch bag. The whole puzzle is wrapped in a customized gift box.
Pros
- Improves concentration levels.
- Stimulates problem-solving capabilities.
- Enhances color perception and hand-eye coordination.
- Safe for children in every way.
- Children can learn about shapes, colors, and animals.
- Perfect for gifting.
Cons
- A bit expensive.
Buyers Guide
By now, you've got an overview of the top-selling six educational toys for kids. Still, it's essential to know about the determining factors for buying the best educational toys for 15-month-olds.
Inspires To Think Out-Of-Box
Consider looking for toys that get your kids involved in productive activities. Children love to utilize their imagination, so ensure you're giving them toys that inspire their cognitive and creative skills. Rather than giving them a kit to form a car or boat, why not get them some building blocks that let them build anything they desire? Toys that serve specific purposes are good, but you need to hold back a little and ensure you give them a chance to use their imagination and have fun with the toys.
Encourages Physical Activity
There's a likelihood for your child to get into computer games once he or she grows up. Why not give them toys that encourage physical activities while they are youthful? Some toys encourage them to be more active than merely sitting on the floor playing. Rather than going for the latest tech-savvy toys, you can go for ones that require the kid to crawl or walk and push before they light up.
Grows With The Kid
You will likely find toys expensive. So it's wise not to invest your money on toys that will amuse your kids for only a few months. Take time to look for toys that will grow with your youngster. Some toys start at one level for your infant and get changed into something slightly different to become more challenging as your kid ages.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Should My 15-Month-Old Be Learning?
When it comes to what 15-month-old kids need to know, specialists often focus on milestones that relate to cognition, language, speech, social-emotional behavior, and hand and finger developments.
If you find your kids accommodating, you can make them familiarized with the alphabet. However, there's no need to push your child in memorizing the letters serially. Instead, guardians need to focus on cultivating a love for reading. You can do that by sharing books with your kid daily. At 15 months old, a child can understand more than it can verbally communicate. When asked about objectives, a 15-month old child will be able to figure similar objects in books. Thus they will be able to sort and distinguish shapes based on sizes and shapes.
What Motor Skills Should A 15-Month Old Have?
It is likely that a 15-months old child crawls or stoops to pick up toys and climbs on furniture. Kids keep progressing consistently and love spending time outdoors, which increases muscle strength and refines balance. Your little kid can most likely stack building blocks and grab a cup or a spoon, yet not without spilling. Their capacity to effectively manipulate small-sized objects can put them at risk of stifling or swallowing dangerous things, for instance, batteries or consuming adult medicines.
Wrap Up
Finding the right toy for your toddler can be difficult. Every toy promises to be fun and educational, and a lot of times, we just buy whatever we think the child will like.
But if you are looking for real educational content, you should be willing to explore toys that will teach a thing or two, not just be attractive to the child's senses.
If we were to pick our top choice from these toys, the Mega Bloks First Builders Building Blocks would be a clear winner. Blocks are an evergreen toy that teaches children about building things, hand-eye coordination, problem-solving, and even understanding colors and numbers.
The VTech Sort and Discover cube is another fun and engaging toy, with lots of small games and activities for the child to explore.
As a parent of a five-year-old inquisitive boy, I have gained a lot of experience finding fun activities and toys to help him understand science and understanding our world in general. On this blog, you’ll find an extensive amount of tutorials, guides, and toys about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math based on my personal experience to help your child develop critical STEM skills.
