Post on front page… please help!

I have a website with a static front page. I wanted to add a page at the end on which to put posts, which I’ve called blog. I have set the page for posts as “blog” under Reading/Settings. I managed to add a post to the “blog” page, but a link to the post (including the first few words…)appeared at the top of my homepage with a large snowflake icon above it. I have searched in vain through the forum for a way to get rid of this, but I cannot find one. I have put the post into a category called “blog” as I thought I could then exclude certain categories from my homepage, but that hasn’t worked as I don’t know how to do that, and I tried downloading two plugins that were meant to help but neither worked. I’m not a coder and I could alter small snippets of code if someone tells me exactly what to do, but would prefer a non coding answer… please help. I don’t want any preview of the posts to appear on my homepage ata ll. Thanks in advance.