List Recent Posts

I am currently trying to design a full wordpress website. I have worked with many themes before and not had any trouble, but i feel i am running into a problem with this current layout.
Normaly when designing a wordpress site, i create the site as a normal html site, then i create a link to the wordpress for “our blog”. then i just create a template that matches the rest of the site, and it works pretty good.
What i am looking to do for this current project is use wordpress to create a FULL page. i will create the pages in wordpress and everything will be wordpress. the problem i am running into is as follows:

I want the front page of site to be one of the Pages i have designed. this works perfect and the page displays just as i want. The problem i am having is that i like the idea of listing the 5 (or whatever) most recent articles, so i have created a button on the top of the page called “our blog”. i want this to link to what would normally be the front page (a list of the 5 most recent posts). I have looked through the codex and not found this, but i feel like this should be very easy to do (just not figuring it out myself). any help or links to articles that might cover this is much appreciated.