My very verbal DD with great visual skills, excellent reading skills, and incredible spelling skills hates word searches. She likes mazes, though, and Sudoku (both of which I think engage higher thinking than word searches). She's good at them. She just thinks they're a drag.

She also hates word unscrambles, which she has been getting a LOT of this year...and they're things like "key manufacturing outputs of Tennessee" (METAL FASTENERS).