Changing the front page

I have put all my site pages into WordPress.

I don’t want the blog page to be the front page though. I used Ryan Boren’s Page to Front plugin to change this so that my old home page becomes the front page.

Now, how do I display the page of posts???

I copied the index.php page in my theme and made the copy into a page template by adding something like:
<?php
/*
Template Name: blogpage
*/
?>
I then created a page called blog and made it’s page template ‘blogpage’ but I don’t see a page of posts when I do this.

What have I misunderstood and done wrong?

Cheers,

Deryck