Welcoming Families From Around the World

You are working in an early childhood setting of your choice—a hospital, a child care center, a social service agency. You receive word that the child of a family who has recently emigrated from a country you know nothing about will join your group soon. You want to prepare yourself to welcome the child and her family. Luckily, you are enrolled in a course about diversity and have learned that in order to support families who have immigrated you need to know more than surface facts about their country of origin.

My family in this scenario is from Russia.  
To prepare to be culturally responsive towards this new family from Russia, I will:

               1.  Perform online and library research about the country and the area in which the family is coming from.
               2.  Reach out to cultural community resources for information and opportunities for myself and the family.       
               3.  Schedule a meeting with the family in order to take the opportunity to get to know the family and observe 
               4.  Prepare the classroom to be culturally responsive to this new family(ideally it should already be this)
               5.  Prepare the curriculum to be culturally responsive for the new student.

My hope is that these preparations will give the best beginning opportunity for the student and help their family feel welcome in this country.  It is scary enough moving to a new place, let alone to a place that speaks a different language and possibly holds different beliefs than their own.  I am hoping that the meeting with the family will give me a better look into their family culture.  I believe the biggest thing anyone needs to remember is that having an open mind and approaching the situation with reserved preconceived notions  will help prevent offending the family and allow the student and their family to be themselves.