Reading level benchmarking - how does it work?

[ICanSeeCherryBlossom]

Hi,
Hoping some teachers/TA's can shed some light on the reading level benchmarking process.

DS is in year 2 and on the Turquoise book band, so some way below the target level. He's always struggled with reading.

His teacher benchmarked him after lockdown to see if he could move up, but she said his comprehension just wasn't there, and was only just at his current level. His fluency was fine though.

I'm wondering if there's anything we can do to help him? When we read with him at home, we check he understands the story, and he does. He can relay it back to us, and we can have a chat about it.

What does the comprehension part of the benchmarking entail?
DS is very literal with questions - he won't expand an answer unless explicitly asked for more, or led. I'm wondering if that's the problem when at school?

Any help or insight gratefully received.

Comp skills can be categoriesed into VIPERS - vocab, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, summarising.
If you Google VIPERS question stems KS1, you'll find the types of questions to be asking him.

Thanks very much Springingintospring. I've googled it and that looks super helpful!

I used to do benchmarking. I was given a book at the next level up and a list of questions. Id get the child to read the book in their head, then ask them to retell the story to me. Then they'd read it out loud and i had a little grid to mark if they made a mistake and what type of mistake it was - eg substituting a different word. Then there were a list of about 3-5 questions about the book . They were things about what happened but also what was infered and what might happen. Im not a teacher so i just followed the instructions.
Im sure actual teachers can just gauge from listening and asking a couple of questions
It was very interesting as some fluent readers had very little idea what some key words meant and some very stumbly readers understood what they were reading well.
I found asking a child to retell the story and then asking things like 'what do you think it means that his face was bright read' at the end of heading out loud were really useful.
Also the higher up book bands it isnt that the words are harder but the sentences are a bit longer and have more complexity so the comprehension is more important.

Thanks MildredPuppy. I'll definitely ask him to read in his head and tell me the story. I wonder if he does actually read in his head or just looks at the pictures. When we read with him we have to cover the pictures and only let him see them after he's read because he spends so long just staring at them! If they did something like that with him at school I can well believe he made up an approximation based on the pictures which could have been totally wrong.

"DS is very literal with questions - he won't expand an answer unless explicitly asked for more, or led. I'm wondering if that's the problem when at school?"
This is the issue. Some children find inference difficult, and maybe he needs more practice with that. Ask questions like " how was the boy feeling"? "How do you know?" " Which sentence tells you that he was hungry/unhappy?" Keep checking that he does understand the meanings of words - I have been teaching for over a decade and it still surprises me that words I had thought were fairly commonplace, or easy to understand in context, were actually not understood by more than 1 or 2 children in a class.

I'll try working on that with him DelphiniumBlue - thank you. I've asked him what a particular part of the story is about, and he looks totally perplexed. I'm sure he doesn't understand why I'm asking because he thinks "but I've just told you what it's about because I've just read it to you!".
In his maths workbook there was a question asking 'was Bobby correct? How do you know?'. DS wrote 'No. Because he is wrong'. Clearly we need to get him to expand things a little!