Syllabus connotes the subjects as well as the topics covered in the course of study. On the other hand, curriculum

The Shark Game.

The Shark Game activity is a variation of the classic Hangman game, but instead of a person and noose, there is a person and shark. This is an excellent Warmer for introducing a lesson topic, or for use as a Cooler to identify a set of vocabulary taught in class.
Here is how the activity looks when first set up on the whiteboard:

Shark Game 1

This activity works well with all student age groups and the basic premise of this activity is to work out the hidden word before the shark eats the person, who takes a step down each time a letter is provided which doesn’t make up one of the letters in the hidden word. When playing this game with children, you could introduce pronunciation skills and extended vocabulary by prompting a word which begins with the letter suggested. For example: “A, for Apple”. It’s also fun to choose a student from the class to be the person who is taking the steps down towards the shark. Feel free to be creative with the presentation of this game, for example by giving the shark a hat and tie :)
And here is how this activity looks when (successfully) completed:

Shark Game 2

As you can see, the students wrongly guessed five letters (left column) and means that the student only had to walk six steps before the word ‘TEACH’ was guessed correctly. This time the shark goes hungry! :)
2. Whiteboard Scrabble.
Divide your students into groups — or make this a teacher-student game if teaching an individual student — and write five letters on the board, such as A, M, D, L, E. Students must write down as many words as possible, within a certain time limit, which contain some, or all five letters. After the time limit is up, write up on the board, under each team’s column, the words which they have come up with and assign a point for each letter included from the list. So in the example of our letters, ‘DAM’ would earn three points, ‘MALE’ would earn four and ‘MEDAL’ would earn five points. Students can create longer words with these letters in for extra points, such as MEDALLION, earning nine points. You can tweak the rules of the game as you like, for example prohibiting the use of a letter more than once.
3. 20 Words.
’20 Words’ is an excellent activity to use when practicing the formation of questions. One student thinks of any person, alive or dead, and the class have 20 questions in which to try and guess who the person is. The rules of the game are simple: the student can only answer “yes”, or “no”. Example questions to ask the student could be: “Is this person alive?”, “Is this person famous?”, “Does this person live in our country?”, “Is this person a man or woman?”. And so on.
4. Lovely and Horrible.
This is especially relevant for when you begin a new class. Divide your students into pairs or groups, and ask each pair or group to divide a sheet of paper into two columns: one labelled ‘Lovely’ and the other, ‘Horrible’. How to play this activity is for you to read out a list of words, and for your learners to add them either to the ‘Lovely’ column, or the ‘Horrible’ column. You can choose any words, such as ‘English’, ‘Justin Bieber’, ‘Donald Trump’, ‘Cheese’, etc. When you have finished reading out your list of words and your learners have written all the words down in either column, the class can compare their answers and see how different their tastes are. This is a great warmer to use as a classroom Icebreaker and invariably leads to humorous and sometimes heated debate.