According to Piaget, morality and knowledge are developed through an internal process of construction, and they are closely related (1994). The pedagogical implications of Piaget's theory, in both fields moral and intellectual, are shown by Kamii and DeVries (1991). Based in this theory, they developed teaching principles and cognitive and social-emotional objectives to be used in activities for preschool. In the physical knowledge activities, the children's actions in relation to an object are described in four levels. Gonçalves (1991) creates physical knowledge activities for the first grades of elementary school and she adapts the teaching principles and the cognitive objectives of Kamii and DeVries to these grades, and she verifies that the level of causal explanations, which is not reached in preschool, is done in the first grades. The social-emotional objectives defined by Kamii and DeVries are related to the relationship between children and adults, and cover the development of autonomy, cooperation, and initiative, considering that according to Piaget's constructivism, these characteristics are essential for this construction. In this way, since the theory of Gonçalves is related to the cognitive field, we try to investigate the potential of the physical knowledge activities in the social-emotional development in the first grades.
Moral education; autonomy; cooperation