This article examines maternal everyday teaching strategies in Chinese, American, Hutterite, and Native American cultural communities. It moves beyond a theoretical framework based on distancing by suggesting that effective adult teaching strategies are contextually and culturally determined. The authors urge early childhood educators to make efforts to understand the complexity of a child's home learning environment and to maximize the learning potential of every child by taking advantage of his/her funds of knowledge in early childhood education settings. (Contains 7 tables, 1 figure and 2 notes.)