How to get the list of announcements on my home page

to create a custom list you use the views.module. Documentation found here: Views Documentation & Tutorials

if you've set up a taxonomy for the "annoucements" then you can simply set your default front page, administer -> site settings to this taxonomy list page.

please read: Taxonomy: A way to organize content

specifically this part:

When you create a new term, Drupal assigns it a number. And you can call up all the items categorized under that term by calling for its number.
To see your term's number, go to the categories page, choose list terms for the category to which your term belongs, and now hover over your term's name in the list. You'll see the number.
Now, on the menus page (administer >> site building >> menus) you can create a menu item for your term. Select add item, and when you fill in the path field you add your term like this:
taxonomy/term/1

If the term "sonatas" is term 1, this would call for all the nodes of that category.

If the term "Bach" is term 2, this could call for only those sonatas written by Bach:

taxonomy/term/1,2

Or if Brahms is term 3 and this will call for everything that has to do with either Bach or Brahms:

taxonomy/term/2+3

If you are using a hierarchical taxonomy, and want all notes tagged with child terms to show up also, you can create an URL link like taxonomy/term/2/2 where the second parameter is the depth that the tree will be recursed into, or taxonomy/term/2/all for all child terms.

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