<![CDATA[This study investigated the effect of using word board media on improving the reading skills of children aged 5–6 years at PAUD PKK Banjar Serasan. Reading was one of the fundamental literacy skills that played a crucial role in children’s cognitive and language development. However, many early childhood learners still faced difficulties in recognizing letters, forming words, and reading simple texts due to the limited use of interactive learning media. To address this issue, word board media was applied as an alternative instructional tool. The research employed a pre-experimental method with a one-group pretest-posttest design. The subjects were seven children (four boys and three girls) selected through saturated sampling. Data were collected through observation and reading tests, then analyzed using the paired sample t-test with SPSS 22. The results showed that the mean posttest score was significantly higher than the pretest score, with a calculated t-value of 11.225 exceeding the t-table value of 2.446 at a 5% significance level. These findings indicated that the use of word board media had a significant positive effect on children’s reading skills. The study concluded that simple, low-cost, and teacher-friendly instructional media such as word boards could be effectively used to stimulate early literacy development in preschool settings. Future research was recommended to explore variations of word board designs and involve larger samples to strengthen the generalizability of the findings.]]>
