he can read difficult books aloud with very good expression. He's not great at explaining them, but he does fine with comprehension tests that ask questions that are no so open-ended.
This sounds a lot like my ds who has an expressive language disorder. Any type of open-ended writing assignment through him for a loop, but he was (is) a very advanced reader who understands everything he reads. Working with an SLP on summarizing has helped tremendously.
The SLP wants to work with him on summarizing and other comprehension skills (I assume on a "pull-out" basis). His teacher has him in a much lower reading group than we expected, mostly because he can't seem to retell a story that he just read. But the SLP discovered that he can't retell a story that he just heard any better, so the problem doesn't really necessarily seem to be reading comprehension.
It sounds like he's had a good SLP eval and the school's SLP has a good plan for helping your ds - truly the SLP part of this all sounds very encouraging! The one thing I'd ask about in the meeting is that he be moved up into a higher level reading group that is appropriately challenging for him. With my 2e ds, the one thing that was really difficult to see until it was actually tried, was that remediation didn't work for him when he was given material to work with that was below his intellectual ability. The first time he successfully tackled a writing assignment in school (after literally not producing anything for several years) was when he was given a complex and challenging writing assignment in his gifted pull-out. It's really important to note here that I'm not saying the problem he had with writing was that he wasn't given gifted-level assignments - he had very real problems with expressive language - what I'm saying is he *learned* best and remediation worked much more effectively when it was given at the intellectual level his brain was working at, not at a lower grade level.
Best wishes,
polarbear
