Under the people, places and environments theme you could create a project of exploring your own family history. If you have relatives who have come to the United States from another country, you can make an especially personal project. Ask them to tell you stories about how they lived in their previous country. Find out if they kept any journals or diaries. If yes, ask whether they will let you copy some of those entries down or make photocopies.
Another project involves visiting a living history museum where the personnel reenact the way people worked and lived in a different time. Living history museums, such as Mystic Seaport, Plymouth Plantation, Strawberry Banke and Old Sturbridge Village make fun family outings that can serve as the foundation for a social studies project.
You can participate in a group activity that relates to the cultural theme of social studies. This activity is known as a diversity day observance. During this activity, each work group chooses a different country to research and sets up an informational display about it. The displays can include such things as the kind of geography and climate in each country (e.g., mountainous or desert). The displays may also include examples or photographs of traditional dress and information on each country's major religion or religions. Displays may also include samples of indigenous foods, which participants can enjoy sampling from all of the different national displays.
Institutions start at the level of family and range up through international organizations such as the United Nations. For this theme you might, for example, compare the lifestyle of some homeschooling families with the lifestyle of families whose young people attend traditional schools. You could also read some books for young people that were written by authors from a historical time (e.g., Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series or Louisa May Alcott's March family series) and explore how family values in those times compare to family values of contemporary times.
At the level of larger institutions, you could create a project to examine how membership in different churches influences lifestyles on either a group or individual basis. Another idea is to conduct a study of how your town's government operations differ from the government workings in the city nearest you (or vice versa).
If you wish to explore the production, distribution and consumption theme within social studies you might research the benefits and the drawbacks of obtaining produce locally (such as through a farmer's market) compared to obtaining food products through a global distribution system such as a supermarket. You could also choose several products your family commonly uses and research where each of them comes from (e.g., coffee and avocados from South America; potatoes from Maine or Idaho; or seafood products from New England, Chesapeake Bay or the Pacific waters near Seattle).