I think the part of you that feels bad about her having to do word searches is on the right track! We've been really lucky with our teachers so far, in that they don't expect the busywork to be done. DS7 gets different things to do at school, and even though he brings home pages of garbage, his teacher says it's just habit for her to hand them out to everyone and that he shouldn't bother with anything he doesn't want to do. I thought at the beginning of this year that we were going to have a problem, when he brought home the first "math minute" pages, but after a couple days of my sending back completed multiplication pages that I printed out online she told me to ignore the busy stuff.
You might try making up your own homework like that, or offering to send in extra pages of whatever DD would rather be doing so that she can do them at school.
