So I am trying to basically grab 1-2 of the most recent pages from three+ navigation categories and display them as links with perhaps a short "teaser" of text all on the homepage. How do I go about writing this?

Example:

Mysite.com has categories:
News
Weather
Jokes
Blog
Comments

and the homepage should have a section called "Recent Entries" which displays up to 10 of the recent pages, equally balanced across all categories.

Thanks in advance for any help on this!

This article explains it.

http://doc.silverstripe.org/recipes:displaying_five_latest_pages_from_multiple_pagetypes