How to improve your child's literacy

I disagree with

"8. Make flash cards of easy basic 'sight words' (the, go, like, can, we, went, etc.) and look for them in books."

in large part because word-attack skills ought to be generalizable to all words. It's not clear why those words are identified as "sight words," as the only common characteristic of those words is that they are high-frequency words, which means they will soon become familiar to children who read them a lot anyway.

I looked for scholarly articles first, but they are mostly behind pay walls. The Wikipedia article of closely related interest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics

is not too bad.