I love words. I love writing, and the nuance of spelling and how combinations of letters blend to create a specific sound depending on what other letters come before and after. I am also weird and know that this is not how most people see words.
Word searches help develop letter combination recognition. The word you're looking for is ambience, so you start scanning the word search for A's, simultaneous scanning the letters surrounding the A to find the ones with an M next to that A. Then you scan those for ones with the AMB combination. By building on each letter, it helps reinforce the way the word actually builds on letters from beginning to end and can be very helpful in picturing the word in your head come spelling test at the end of the week.
At least, that's how it works for some. For others, it is a totally inane, ridiculously boring assignment that is finished with the least amount of effort and mostly by cheating off what your friends around you have already found. It does nothing to increase test scores.
And for those with dyslexia and learning disabilities, it is just a practice in torture, having the ability to create frustration on a multitude of levels in a single assignment. It really has to be one of the absolute worst assignments for someone with dyslexia.
So, perhaps writing your Congressman to request he draft a bill to completely ban word searches might be unreasonable, as those few weird children like me would be deprived of the discovery that they love letters and words the way some people love nice cars. But accepting it as a reasonable assignment for a child with dyslexia would be out of the question for me. The year my son had a teacher who decided she was going to "fix" my son and required word searches, that was the year I decided earning zeros in third grade was a completely reasonable thing to do.
