Animations: just making sure my workflow is right.

Ok, I'm making a first person sword fighting game. This is my first game project that deals with animations, and I need to make sure my workflow sounds right.

So in the game, I need to click the mouse and have the player do an attack with the sword. I read somewhere that you can make the sword parent to a bone on the rig, so I figured I could just make an extra bone in the hand and make my animations, then parent the sword to that bone. There would be two objects, the sword and the arms. Then I would have more controllable physics and particles with the sword. I could also switch weapons. Is this the right way to do it? Thanks for the help and patience.