This is a really great question. I have a daughter who just turned 2, so I guess I have some experience with this. Lots of other commenters are correct in poi

This is a really great question. I have a daughter who just turned 2, so I guess I have some experience with this. Lots of other commenters are correct in pointing out that 1 year old is really still very young. A 1 year old is still trying to learn how to stand, move around, feed themselves. Their brain is spending more time developing gross motor skills than fine motor skills. They don't have much logic yet, and they are only beginning to learn things like cause and effect and object permanence. I'll try to point out what things she can do at 1, but also things she will grow into over the next year. Blocks are a great gift for a 1 year old. We have some wooden ones with alphabet letters and numbers and animals, and we also have Megablocks. My 2 year old still plays with those, and as they develop finer motor skills and logic, they can play different kinds of games with the blocks (e.g. "lets put all the same colored ones together"). Musical stuff is also a really good gift for a 1 year old (and musical skill happens to correlate strongly with programming skill). So you could get her a xylophone or some toddler percussion stuff. At this age she will just bang on them, but that's fine, and like with the blocks, her play will develop as she learns finer motor skills and logic. Reading to kids at any age is good for them, so you could also get them some board books. Between 1 and 2, she will go through huge development in fine motor skills, logic, and language. In this year she'll become more ready for paper books, like Dr. Seuss books or Goodnight Moon, and will start to memorize them. She will start to learn that the words on the page go with the words to the story and pretend to read along. She'll also have the fine motor skills to put together the Duplo Legos. She will also start to understand cause and effect, and the basics of time (now vs later vs tomorrow). Her play will become more imaginative too. Around 2 is when she will also start to understand the difference between boys and girls, and this is where you will want to be more careful in the kinds of toys she is exposed to. I try to acknowledge the differences between how boys and girls play, without enforcing the negative gender stereotypes. A while ago, some HN commenter, who happened to be a child development psychologist, made a statement that stuck with me. She said something like "all kids can play with the same kinds of toys, but boys will play just for the sake of play, but girls need to breathe life into their toys." This has turned out to be really true, at least with my daughter and her playgroup of friends. She plays with Lego Duplos, but she wants to know what all the Lego people are doing, give them places to go, have them take care of baby Legos, have them use a Lego potty, etc. She plays with Matchbox cars, but again, she is more interested in building rich stories for them and having the cars talk to each other than racing them. Boys do this too, but girls seem to need this kind of play more than boys do in order to stay interested and engaged. Playing with a 2 year old is actually a lot of fun. :-)