My 3rd-year Spanish teacher in high school did some things like this, but it was a public high school and we didn't actually spend that much time with these people - we only had the class for 6 months, 1 period a day. We'd write down things about ourselves and put them in a hat, draw them out and read them. The one I remember was a person had a 35 lb cat.
2009-11-24
Sometimes YouTube has insightful things on it. "In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates." (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
Etc:
