First 100 Trucks and Things That Go

By Roger Priddy

First 100 Trucks and Things that Go is a super popular book, and I often see it recommended on Reddit and other parenting forums. Is it any good? Let’s get into it!

➡️ While you’re here, be sure to check out my all-time favorite truck books!

🌟 Looking for a quick recommendation? Jump right to the final verdicts!

Who is Roger Priddy and What are the First 100 Books?

Roger Priddy’s “First 100” series is a large collection of board books with photographs of things kids see in daily life. The series includes things like First 100 Words, First 100 Animals, First 100 Nature Words, First 100 Farm Words, and on and on.

Each page has a whole bunch of photos on brightly colored backgrounds. Each photo is labeled with the name of the pictured item. And that’s it! That’s all there is to it.

These are great for little kids because they can “read” them all on their own. My toddler loves pointing at the pictures for an adult to give the “official” names, but then he can also flip through and name each item from memory.

What are the different versions of First 100 Trucks and Things That Go?

There are several different versions of this book, and some closely related books. It’s pretty confusing, so I’ll break it down.

First 100 Big Board: Trucks and Things That Go

Multicolored cover

This is a large-format board book. In this version, each oversized spread is organized by theme. The themes include rescue vehicles, construction, farm vehicles, everyday vehicles, trains, water, and flying. (This is the one we have at our house.)

First 100 Trucks and Things That Go

Yellow and orange cover

This is the small format board book. It has some spreads organized by truck type, but other spreads with different organization, like vehicles by color. It also has different types of looser thematic categories, like “tough trucks,” “transporter trucks,” and “on the road.”

First 100 Trucks Lift-the-Flap

Red cover

The “Lift-the-Flap” edition is a bit different. There are some pages with the typical photo-array layout, but other pages have lift-the-flaps revealing different information. For example, one page asks how many wheels each vehicle has, and lifting the flaps reveal the answer.

First 100 Trucks and Things That Go Sticker Book

Yellow and orange cover with border

Kids match stickers to the names and shapes of the vehicles throughout the book. There are pages for vehicles by type and by color, and activity pages where kids can stick trucks to make scenes. The stickers are essentially one-time-use, although they can probably be carefully peeled and re-stuck by a parent once or twice. This is a paper book, not a board book.

My Big Truck Book

White cover

Another large-format board book, this one focuses exclusively on trucks.

My Little Book of Trucks and Things That Go

White cover with tabs

At 8” x 9” it’s not actually that little! This one has colored tabs, rather than colorful backgrounds for the pictures. Each page has a prompting question, like “Which vehicle has a ladder?”

Priddy Books has even more truck content, like Slide & Find Trucks, and the Mini Tab books, but I’m going to focus on the most popular books here that are closely related to the First 100 series.

An Honest Mom’s Opinion

We have the Big Board book version, so I’ll focus on that and then give my take on the other versions based on closely watching video flip-throughs.

First 100 Big Board

My kid loves this book. It might actually be his favorite book. He loves carrying it around (it’s satisfyingly huge and heavy). He loves flipping through it by himself. He loves flipping through it and pointing at the vehicles and asking their names.

That said, I do not love this book. I do appreciate everything that my kid likes about it! But its flaws drive me completely bonkers. There are vehicles in this book with non-standard naming: for example, there’s something called a “quad bike” that would be called an ATV in any other book (and appears to be called an ATV even in the other editions of this book!) There’s something called a “life boat” that’s… well, I’m not sure what it is! It doesn’t look like lifeboats you’d see on something like the Titanic, that’s for sure.

Worse, there are photos that aren’t really a proper category. This page is the worst offender:

What’s the difference between a “Classic Car” and a “Vintage Car”? Heck if I know. And I don’t think my toddler is picking up on the fine distinction between a “Sports Car” and a “Super Car.” The worst is “Family Car,” which appears to be a compact SUV. Speaking of which, nothing on the page is labeled “SUV,” “Sedan,” or “Minivan”! So it’s missing many of the basic words we actually use to describe cars!

Worst offender of all: that is not a canoe. It is a kayak. A KAYAK.

This might sound like the crazed nitpicking of an overstressed toddler parent, but I genuinely think it’s confusing and unhelpful to a little kid. Toddlers are just learning to categorize things in the world, and the photos should represent meaningful categories that match the language adults use.