Multiple content blocks

Wow, people weren't kidding when they talked about the Drupal learning curve... So I'm getting pretty comfortable with Drupal now, reading lots of articles, playing around a bit. But one thing I cannot figure out how to do is display multiple content blocks. I think that's the right terminology.

So I plan on having multiple types of content, and I would like the latest few posts of that type of content to display on the front page. For instance, a block for a blog, a block for something like a quote of the day, a block for a poll... etc. I'm looking to move away from the default, blog-like display of content. I'm sure I've seen sites where people do this back when I was researching what type of CMS to go with.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for doing this? Thanks!