Activities for 15 Month Olds

Last Updated on January 29, 2026 by Jordyn Koveleski Gorman

Sensory activities for 15 month olds

Sensory engagement provides important input for the development and refinement of motor skills. (2) A simple example of this concept in practice is that your child relies on visual input to help coordinate their hands to reach for objects. The feel of those objects in their hands helps them grasp and manipulate them!

A few of our favorite sensory activities for 15 month olds are:

1. Turn a few spoons and forks into “outside play” tools to help get your little one more comfortable with manipulating them! Encourage them to dig, scoop, and pour with the spoon. Pierce leaves or slide dirt clumps off with the fork! Practicing these skills outside of feeding time helps reduce pressure during mealtimes and exposes your little one to lots of textures and uses a variety of senses. Keep in mind, at this age they’ll probably try to taste everything.
2. Get your dancing feet on with a little body part boogie! Grab a stuffed animal helper, or just use your body. Sing to the tune of The Wheels on the Bus, labeling each body part with its own verse. “These are my hands, they clap, clap, clap / clap, clap, clap! These are my hands, they clap, clap, clap / All day long!” Other verses to try include: feet stomp, legs walk, arms wave, eyes blink, nose sniff, ears hear, mouth laughs, and head shakes.

Crafts for 15 month olds

Did you know that by 15 months we expect littles to grasp a marker or crayon and make a scribble? Don’t panic if you haven’t tried it yet. Your little one will likely pick it up quickly, given the chance to try!

A few of our favorite development-supportive crafts for your 15 month old are:

Sticker and paint rainbow

1. Draw a rainbow outline, leaving space for your little one to put stickers down or color in each line.
2. Draw red dots along the red row, orange dots along the orange row, etc. This gives your child a target for where to place their sticker or color. Let them make the dots or do them together!
3. You can help your toddler run a paint stick over the rainbow or model picking up a sticker with your pincer finger and thumb and placing it on the corresponding color.
4. Provide as much or as little assistance as your little one needs!

Taste-safe sand sensory bin

1. Add equal parts baking soda and cornstarch to a large tray and let your little one mix it up with their hands.
2. Gradually add small amounts of water while you or your little one continue to move the mixture around with your hands, until it has reached a consistency that feels like wet sand (pretend beach day, hello!).
3. Now it’s time to play! Make a “sand” castle or use cookie cutters to make shapes in the sand. You could also pretend that your bin is snow and make a snowman or snow angels with your toddler’s hand prints.

Be ready for a little mess with this one, but it’s worth it. Your little one will love it! For more age-appropriate crafts that take less than 10 minutes, check out our craft freebies for every season!

Gross motor activities for 15 month olds

Whether your toddler has started running the other direction when it’s time for a diaper change, or they’re still just mastering the art of walking, gross motor development is happening so fast at this age.

Our top recommendations for gross motor activities for 15 month olds include: 

1. Have a relay race! Okay, so it’s not really a relay or a race. Place a pile of blocks on one side of the room and put one block on the opposite side. Have your little one grab a block from the pile and walk across the room to make a tower. Keep going one block at a time! This activity works on squatting, walking while carrying toys, and turning around without losing balance. No blocks? Try it out with Tupperware or small books! 
2. Practice stepping up onto a step stool. Your little one will need a little extra height support to complete tasks like washing their hands or brushing their teeth for the next few years. Help get them comfortable with stepping onto a stool by offering your hand for support. Navigating going up, turning around, and coming back down again is harder than it looks!

Fine motor activities for 15 month olds

Pointing with one finger outstretched, improving self-feeding skills, and sorting a simple shape (like the circle) in a sorting toy is just the beginning of what your little one is capable of these days. Helping them refine their fine motor skills can be incorporated into so many daily tasks.

Our favorite ways to support your 15 month old’s fine motor development are:

1. Practice page-turning with family photos! For this one, cut a few shapes out of a piece of cardboard and tape a photo of family members or pets on one side of each shape. Place the pictures face down and encourage your little one to practice picking up the cardboard shape and turning it over to reveal the photo. This activity helps develop the skills needed to turn book pages!
2. Take your little one’s favorite toys and put them in your Tupperware containers, with the lids on. Model shaking the container (while saying “shake shake”) and then knocking (“knock knock!”). Then, hand the container to your little one and encourage them to “open” it. You may have to get it started for them, and that’s okay! This activity helps them learn to coordinate both hands to complete a task.

Need more play ideas?

It can be hard to see that photos of your child from a year ago look like a totally different human. Their needs were so different when they were small! When you need extra help keeping up, we’ve got your back. It doesn’t have to be scary or exhausting.

That’s why we created our Playbooks—more than 100 age-appropriate, developmentally supportive ways to play with your child using only what you have at home!

Remember: you’re doing an amazing job raising your little one, and your child loves you so much!

Sources

1. Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2011). Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function: Working Paper No. 11.
2. Yildiz, R., Yildiz, A., Zorlular, R., & Elbasan, B. (2024). Relationship between sensory processing skills and motor skills in 12-month-old infants. Brain and Behavior, 14(9), e70052.