Scolling posts on Front Page

We have a static front page https://www.osmington.info/ and we have a News page (the Posts/Blogs). We want a small scrolling list of recent posts to appear on the static front page so that the front page visitor can immediately see a summary of the latest posts.
I know that we could turn the Posts page into the front page and we could re-design the front page so that we add a side bar.
We did try Page Blocks plus the Vertical Scroll Recent Post widget. This worked fine but insisted on adding all the posts below the front page content. If we could find a way to prevent that, then this would be a perfect solution.