Custom home page

How can we customize the home page? We have a child theme, but I don’t see any functions relating to the home page nor home page templates for MaxWP.

All we want to do is add another set of excerpts under the first set of excerpts. Right now, they are for all categories. We’d like to limit the categories for the current excerpts, and add a new section below that, with other categories.

I assume this can be done with a function, but not sure how to hook in to the current functions or home template.

Thanks for any help!