how many days are in each month?

use your knuckles!

Can you remember how many days are in each month? September, 30 or 31? July and August both have 30, right?

Let me guess. You grew up reciting the nursery rhyme about the days in each month. The idea is if you learn the poem, you’ll always how many days there are in each month.

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November:
All the rest have thirty-one,
Except for February,
Which hath twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine in each leap year.

Hey. If you can remember the damn rhyme you can learn the number of days in each month without the poem. I never learned the damn rhyme. Didn’t have to.

Learning the number of days in each month

Dad had a trick to remember how many days are in each month: We’re all right-handed so we made a fist using our left hand. Knuckles represent 31 days and the valleys between the knuckles are 30 (or 28/29). The neat thing is that once you learned the order of the months you automatically knew how many days are in each month. Try it and see!

I showed my Mom the above YouTube video. It was the first time she’d seen this trick done. I always thought both of my parents taught it to me. Obviously it was Dad.

The number of days in each month are:

jan 31   feb 28/29   mar 31   apr 30   may 31   jun 30
jul 31   aug 31   sep 30   oct 31   nov 30   dec 31