In early childhood education, children's daily practice revolves to a great extent around order and discipline. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a Swedish preschool class, the present study further explores how the task of being a teacher's assistant can be critically understood in terms of how gender, discipline and order are expressed in different duties in daily practice. The children in the investigated preschool class are encouraged to conform to rules of order and discipline by assisting the teachers with different tasks; in the present study, children who play this role are called teacher's assistants. The results show that both boys and girls conform in the role as a teacher's assistant. Another way of establishing order and discipline is to place girls next to noisy boys. This duty, which is defined here as serving as a damper, is reserved for the girls' only, in contrast to the teacher's assistant task. (author abstract)