Cutomised template

Hi,

I’m using the twenty twelve theme and want to create a duplicate template of index.php (in my child theme). I want to have have a plugin widget on the index.php, which I already have (sorted via WP admin).

But I also want to create another template that has ‘latest posts’, and ‘categories’ on the right sidebar, is there a way to do this that overrides the ‘widgets method’.

In short, can I put ‘latest posts’, and ‘categories’ php code into the new template?

Alternately, my method may be wrong, perhaps there is another way of achieving what I want to do?

Thanks, Earl