How Many Days Are In This Month?

A well known verse - author unknown.

I can remember reading the above mnemonic in our Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes. I was also required to write it out, several grades in a row, on lined paper. (Remember the kind with two solid lines separated by a dotted line to guide the writer as to how tall to make upper and lower case letters?) This exercise was to help my classmates and I memorize the number of days in each month.

Do kids still learn this poem?

I wonder - is this rhyme even still taught in grade school?  Or is computer access so readily available for us all, that there is no longer any reason to remember this information? Perhaps, rather than crowd children's minds with unnecessary facts, teachers have decided this poem is no longer unimportant, as they can just as easily use the Internet to look it up?

This verse works well - until I get confused

For me, this poem has been useful, but in a limited sort of way.  Because of the first line (and probably because I remember learning this at the beginning of the school year), I can always remember that September has just thirty days.  I have no trouble remembering the 28 and sometimes 29 days of February.  But my brain can easily confuse May for June, because they both have the same number of syllables. Same thing with November and December (October doesn't sound right there though).  This confusion taints the validity of my use of this poem!

Good thing I learned another trick!

Fortunately, during a school recess, a friend taught me a different mnemonic method of counting months on my fist.  I am not sure of the origin, but I have been told it dates back to Roman times.  

The clenched fist method:

• Make a fist, and hold your hand with the knuckles facing upwards.
• Use your index finger of the other hand to assign each of your knuckles and the indented areas between them with a month.  
• Recite the months in order, beginning with January on the first knuckle, February on the indent, etc.  
• The knuckle of your pinkie finger is therefore July. Start over, naming the first knuckle as August.
• Any month that lands on a knuckle has 31 days; all the indents have less.

I will never get a job as a modeling my chapped hands — but you get the idea!

Continue naming the months, starting over with knuckles on the same hand.

Knuckles and Indents

Do you think you might have trouble remembering this?  I could easily forget whether it is the knuckles or the indents that represent months with 31 days ... but knowing February is a short month solves this confusion.  I look at where February lands — an indent.  That tells me that all the shorter months (28/29 and 30 days) are indents - and all the longest months (31 days) are knuckles.

So - if you ever see me counting on my knuckles, I am probably just trying to figure out how many days are in a month. This can actually be helpful when there is neither a calendar nor the Internet nearby!

Today is September 30 - and my fist tells me it is therefore the last day of September!  

Did you already know these memory aids? Do you have favorite memory tricks that you use?

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