I noticed that many of my students were talking about how they did not like there looks and wanted to get plastic surgery. This troubled me, so for my middle school extra class I decided that we needed to look at what true beauty really is.

We started class by talking about what beauty is. Students then wrote 1 thing that they wanted to change about themselves and put it in a jar (none of the students put their names on these). I then read each piece of paper out loud and then discussed why they would want to change these things about themselves. By this I was able to challenge them to why they would want to change their looks as they were all beautiful.

I then started the PowerPoint presentation attached. It starts out with the dove commercial "true colours" which after showing it we went through the people in it and I asked them if they believed what the girls didn't like about themselves (all the students were shocked that they would think this) and then talked about the last bit of the clip where they had confidence and how they all looked beautiful.

This was followed by Dove's campaign for real beauty/evolution video and dove's asian evolution . These videos were both watched a few times and then based on the shocked reactions to the students we discussed and I explained what was going on. The last clip we watched just a small part of the link provided (start it at ):56 and end it at 1:28 ... it shows one of the girls from Girls Generation and what she naturally looks like and what she looks like with makeup and after being Photo-shopped.

After these discussions we went through the rest of the slides and talked about the definitions of beauty, looked at the forms of plastic surgery being used and why, as well as looking at the difference between the western look on beauty and the Asian look, followed lastly by re-defining what beauty was.

students then wrote 3 things that they liked about themselves (could be looks or personality) and put them in the jar. I read all of these and discussed why we should think of what we like about ourselves and not our weaknesses. We also talked about what real beauty was and then the students asked me questions about it.

This lesson took about an hour and a half.