The cylinder blocks are a set of four blocks made out of Beachwood. Each of these blocks is a rectangular prism with concave faces to facilitate firm holding. Wondering on the purpose of these blocks? They help the child in getting used to pincer grip. The pincer grip as you are aware becomes a foundation to writing at a later stage – holding pencils. Look at them visually and you would notice the discrimination of sizes is evident. Child gets the first stage of being able to visually discriminate the dimensions and as child’s competency grows he/she would begin to differentiate it with the touch. Cylinder blocks also play a pivotal role in understanding mathematics and language as child explores them further - height and diameter become part of the explorations. The surfaces are highly polished. Each block has 10 sockets and there are 40 knobbed cylinders that fit into these sockets. The knobs are the pencil grip type. Montessori Cylinder block is an amazing Sensorial Montessori toy to help the child become conscious of the three linear dimensions, their variations, the differences in dimensions and the four possible ways in which objects can differ dimensionally, by means of their visual sense. To help the child prepare himself indirectly for writing by acquiring prehensile co-ordination to hold the writing instrument with necessary and sufficient firmness. To help the child become conscious not only of the dimensions but also that they exist in different intensities Click on this link to know how to use Montessori Cylinder blocks http://www.infomontessori.com/sensorial/visual-sense-cylinder-blocks.htm