The rhyme “30 days hath September,” is a popular mnemonic that helps you remember the number of days in each month. It goes like this:
“30 days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, excepting February alone, which has 28 days clear, and 29 in each leap year.”
Does this strategy work for you? It doesn’t for me, probably because of my lack of enthusiasm in reciting the text over and over. It’s not that I’m lazy, but I just find it visually unappealing, and so not motivated to learn it that way.
What other option do we have to learn this effectively?
Let’s take a logical approach to tackle this “problem”.
From a visual representation, we can think of months with 30 days being even, or odd where the amount of days is 31. For now, ignore February, and learn the rest.
The table below shows how I used my mind to learn the amount of days for each month. You can use the same thought patterns, or create new ones of your own. I would suggest creating new ones, as this helps cement them in your mind.
| Month | Odd | Even | Memory Association |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 31 Days | I know a person called Jan, so an easy one for me. I imagine her eyes coming out on springs when she looks at me, which is odd behaviour. | |
| February |
29 Days (on a leap year) |
28 Days (on non leap years) |
February is the only month that this system doesn’t function properly because it can be odd, or even. More often than not, it’s even (28 days), then on a leap years, every four years it’s odd (29 days). As valentine’s day falls in February, more often than not we can visualise a dozen roses for our loved one. An even number of roses. But remember leap years fall every four years on 2024, 2028, 2032, 2036 and 2040, etc… |
| March | 31 Days | Imagine a marching band. Maybe three rows of four band members. A member at the back of the third row raises his trumpet and starts wandering out of sync from the other members, whilst blowing his trumpet as loud as he can. Very odd behaviour. | |
| April | 30 Days | I always think April showers. So why not imagine a rainy day, but with very long and straight lines of raindrops, falling evenly. | |
| May | 31 Days | Simply imagine a maypole, with its braids red, yellow, green and blue dangling from it. A dancer is holding onto each braid. Then the maypole grows up and up, like a beanstalk until it pushes through the clouds. You can barely see the dancers or the pole at it proceeds to grow higher and higher. Now if this isn’t odd behaviour, what is? | |
| June | 30 Days | For June, I use the rhyming word Dune for association. The two words sound very similar, so this technique works well. The word ‘Dune’ makes me see a desert in my mind’s eye. I imagine two huge dunes, and I’m walking between them. Two is an even number, so you instantly know theres’s 30 days in June. | |
| July | 31 Days | How do you lie in bed? Say do you lie fast and it sounds quite like ‘July’. I imagine lying across the width of the bed, instead of the normal way, so my head and feet hang over the edges of the bed. This is an odd way to sleep! | |
| August | 31 Days | For August, I use the rhyming word Sawdust for association. The two words sound similar, so this technique works well. The word ‘Sawdust’ to me sums up a mess, with sawdust everywhere on the floor and where you’ve been working. Sawdust will never fall evenly, and so you instantly know it’s odd. | |
| September | 30 Days | September. This wasn’t an easy one for me, so I broke it down into two syllables. Sep and Tember. Still not great because they are not words in their own right. But then Sap (from a tree) and Timber (also from a tree), related in my mind to the two syllables, which gave me Sap-Timber. I can work with this. Imagine a clearing in a forest, where only two trees stand in the centre. There’s a tap on each tree. When turned on, sap flows from the taps. We have two syllables, two trees and two taps, all even numbers. | |
| October | 31 Days | For October, Octopus instantly jumps out at me. I find the Octopus an odd animal, and just seeing it sat on my couch watching David Attenborough on the TV, strikes a very odd note with me! | |
| November | 30 Days | November in the UK, reminds me of November the 5th. Firework night. I see two huge fireworks in my garden. They look more like Elon Musk rockets. They ignite and lift off in unison. Instead of exploding like fireworks, they descend and land back where they started from. There was an even number of rockets. | |
| December | 31 Days | Christmas time always comes to mind for me in December. I see an enormous Christmas tree in my living room. So tall that the top of it has to bend over by about 3 feet, so it fits in my bay window alcove. It doesn’t look very natural stuffed into that space, with the top at an acute angle. In fact, it looks damn right odd. |
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