Aim. The article conceptualises belonging as a central strategy of migrant integration, understood not as an emotional add-on but as the infrastructure of everyday life. Focusing on Ukrainian families in Poland after February 24, 2022, the study shifts the perspective from the logic of “reception” to the logic of inclusion. It examines how home-making practices — language, relationships, routines, and material arrangements — enable migrants to transform institutional spaces into places of lived belonging. Special attention is given to educational institutions as key “laboratories of belonging.” Methods and materials. The analysis is based on qualitative individual and focus group interviews (IDI/FGD) conducted in cooperation with Save the Children, supplemented with statistical data on the presence of people from Ukraine in Poland. The study adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical framework combining migration studies, sociology, and educational research. Particular emphasis is placed on micro-level institutional practices such as bilingual communication, the role of intercultural assistants, predictable daily routines, and administrative accessibility. Results and conclusion. The findings show that “soft” everyday practices generate “hard” integration outcomes: they improve school attendance, stabilise learning processes, shorten administrative procedures, and build trust. Belonging emerges as a key condition for durable integration rather than its secondary effect. The article concludes that effective integration requires the systemic design of an infrastructure of belonging through language, routines, relationships, and accessible procedures. After 2022, Polish schools and preschools became practical laboratories of inclusion where legal frameworks are translated into the lived experience of being “at home.”