VIDALIA — It’s not the tango — it’s the reading salsa, and Concordia Parish teachers were doing it Thursday at Vidalia Junior High School.

The dance, a part of the four-day training to introduce the school district’s literacy program, correlated the moves salsa and literacy. The steps and body shimmies are language decoding and ciphers, and the hand motions are reading comprehension.

“This is an exercise in fluency,” said instructor Sharon Armstrong, of Mangham. “Just like you have to be fluent in the steps of salsa, you need to be fluent in language for reading.”

The Concordia Parish School District recently added the “Literacy for All” program, which uses the same strategies as the Reading First program already in place for kindergarten through third grade, to the pre-K and fourth grade curriculum.

The decision to join the Literacy for All program was made through communication with principals and discussions with faculty, Superintendent Loretta Blankenstein said.

The sometimes-silly dancing aside, the sessions were meant to help teachers better approach the teaching of reading.

Other techniques the teachers learned this week were how to train students in basic reading principles, such as phonetic awareness, Reading First Coordinator Linda Spinks said.

The training is going on statewide this month, and principals as well as teachers attend the sessions, Spinks said.

A total of approximately 4,000 teachers across the state will participate in the training, local presenter for the program Una Knappp said.

The school district will be evaluating the Reading First program this year, Superintendent of Schools Loretta Blankenstein said.

“We saw some gains this year with the third graders in Ferriday, and there were some gains in Monterey,” Blankenstein said. “Those students were the ones who started the program in kindergarten.”

To determine if a student has made gains in reading, the school district uses the DIBELs — dynamic indicators basic early literacy — test and analyzes data in iLEAP test results.

The DIBELs test is an oral test in which students are given a passage to read aloud, and they are scored — depending on what grade level they are — by how many words or sounds a minute they can read, how many words they can identify the meaning of, how many words they can pronounce correctly and how many errors they make while reading.

One of the benefits of joining the Literacy for All program is that those third graders who made gains last year will be able to continue using those same strategies into the fourth grade, Blankenstein said.

“Hopefully, we will be able to continue with those gains, and make some gains in some other schools,” Blankenstein said.